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[Illustration: ]

[Illustration: Sacred tree with its supporters, from St Mark’s, Venice.]




                            THE SACRED TREE
                                   OR
                     THE TREE IN RELIGION AND MYTH


                                   BY
                           MRS. J. H. PHILPOT

[Illustration: ]

                                _London_
                       MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
                    NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                                  1897

                         _All rights reserved_




                                PREFACE


The reader is requested to bear in mind that this volume lays no claim
to scholarship, independent research, or originality of view. Its aim
has been to select and collate, from sources not always easily
accessible to the general reader, certain facts and conclusions bearing
upon a subject of acknowledged interest. In so dealing with one of the
many modes of primitive religion, it is perhaps inevitable that the
writer should seem to exaggerate its importance, and in isolating a
given series of data to undervalue the significance of the parallel
facts from which they are severed. It is undeniable that the worship of
the spirit-inhabited tree has usually, if not always, been linked with,
and in many cases overshadowed by other cults; that sun, moon, and
stars, sacred springs and stones, holy mountains, and animals of the
most diverse kind, have all been approached with singular impartiality
by primitive man, as enshrining or symbolising a divine principle. But
no other form of pagan ritual has been so widely distributed, has left
behind it such persistent traces, or appeals so closely to modern
sympathies as the worship of the tree; of none is the study better
calculated to throw light on the dark ways of primitive thought, or to
arouse general interest in a branch of research which is as vigorous and
fruitful as it is new. For these reasons, in spite of obvious
disadvantages, its separate treatment has seemed to the writer to be
completely justifiable.




                                CONTENTS


                               CHAPTER I
                TREE-WORSHIP—ITS DISTRIBUTION AND ORIGIN

  Primitive conception of the tree-spirit—Illustrations of the evidence
      for tree-worship: from archaeology, from folk-lore, from
      literature, from contemporary anthropology—Earliest record of
      tree-worship, the cylinders of Chaldaea—The symbol of the sacred
      tree; its development—Meaning of the symbol—Tree-worship amongst
      the Semites—Canaanitish tree-worship—The _ashêra_—The decoration
      of the Temple at Jerusalem—Tree-worship in ancient Egypt—The
      sacred sycamores—Survival of the worship in the Soudan and in
      Africa generally—Osiris, originally a tree-god; compared with
      other vegetation spirits—Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus—The
      sacred trees of the Persians—Tree-worship still existent in India;
      evidence of its ancient prevalence—Its incorporation in
      Buddhism—Other instances of tree-worship in the East—The evidence
      from America.

  Greek and Roman tree-worship—The German religion of the
      grove—Persistence of the belief in tree-spirits in Russia, Poland,
      and Finland—Sacred trees in mediaeval France—The rites of the
      Druids—Evidence of tree-worship in Saxon England; its survival in
      May-day customs—General conclusions as to the ancient prevalence
      of tree-worship—Its origin; views of Robertson Smith, Herbert
      Spencer, and Grant Allen                                     Page 1


                               CHAPTER II
                          THE GOD AND THE TREE

  Tree-spirits divisible into tree-gods and tree-demons—The gods of
      antiquity subject to physical limitations, and approachable only
      through their material embodiment or symbol—This embodiment
      frequently a tree—The sycamores of Egypt believed to be inhabited
      by deities—Developments of this conception—In Greece the tree one
      of the earliest symbols of the god—The chief Greek gods in their
      origin deities of vegetation—The ritual of the tree—The tree
      dressed or carved to represent an anthropomorphic god—Late
      survival of this custom amongst the classical nations—Its
      prevalence in other countries.

  The god’s own tree—Zeus and the oak—Apollo and the laurel—Aphrodite
      and the myrtle—Athena and the olive—The association of a
      particular god with a particular tree not known amongst the
      Semites—The bodhi-trees or trees of wisdom of the Buddhas—The
      sculptures of Bharhut—Brahma and the golden lotus—The holy basil
      of India—The grove of Upsala, the home of Woden—Taara and the
      oak—The great oak at Romove.

  Gifts to the tree: in Arabia, in Egypt, in Greece—Dedication of arms,
      trophies, etc.

  The use of branches and wreaths in religious ceremonies—The procession
      of the sacred bough in Greek festivals—The ceremonial use of
      branches common throughout the East.

  The tree as sanctuary and asylum                                     24


                              CHAPTER III
                      WOOD-DEMONS AND TREE-SPIRITS

  General characteristics of the tree-demon—The fabulous monsters of
      Chaldaea—The _jinni_ of Arabia—The hairy monsters of the Bible—The
      tree-demons of Egypt—The woodland creatures of Greece—Centaurs and
      Cyclops—Pan, satyrs, and sileni—The fauns and silvani of
      Italy—Female woodland spirits—The hamadryads—Alexander and the
      flower-maidens—The vine-women of Lucian—Corresponding instances in
      modern folk-lore—The soul of the nymph actually held to inhabit
      the tree—The belief that blood would flow when the tree was
      injured—Examples from Virgil, Ovid, and from modern
      folk-lore—Indian belief in wood-spirits.

  The wood-spirits of Central and North Europe—Their general
      characteristics—The moss-women—The wild women of Tyrol—The
      wood-spirits of the Grisons—The white and green ladies—The Swedish
      tree-spirit—The Russian Ljeschi—The Finnish Tapio—The Tengus of
      Japan—Wood-demons of Peru and Brazil                             52


                               CHAPTER IV
                 THE TREE IN ITS RELATION TO HUMAN LIFE

  The tree represented as the progenitor of the human race; as related
      in the Eddas; in Iranian mythology; amongst the Sioux Indians—The
      classical view—Human beings represented as the fruit of a
      tree—Individual births from a tree—Mythical births beneath a tree;
      Zeus; Hermes; Hera; Apollo and Artemis; Romulus and Remus.

  Metamorphoses—Apollo and Daphne—Meaning of the legend—The daughters of
      Clymene—Baucis and Philemon—Other instances of metamorphosis—The
      growth of flowers from the blood of the dead, or from the tears
      shed over them—Transmigration of souls into trees—Tristram and
      Iseult—Sweet William and Fair Margaret—Other instances.

  The conception of the tree as sympathetically interwoven with human
      life—The family tree—The community tree—The fig-tree in the Roman
      Comitium—The patrician and plebeian myrtle-trees.

  The tree as the symbol of reproductive energy—The Semitic
      mother-goddess—Interpretation of the Chaldaean sacred tree as the
      symbol of fertility—The tree-inhabiting spirit of vegetation as
      the patron of fertility—Observances connected therewith          72


                               CHAPTER V
                           THE TREE AS ORACLE

  The oracular power a corollary to the belief in the tree-inhabiting
      god—Connection of the tree-oracle with the earth-oracle—The
      oracles of the Chaldaeans—Canaanite tree-oracles—“The tree of the
      soothsayers”—The oracular oak of Zeus at Dodona—The oracle of Zeus
      Ammon—The prophetic laurel of Delphi—Oracular trees in Armenia, in
      Arabia—Alexander the Great and the Persian tree-oracles—The
      prophetic ilex grove at Rome—Other Italian tree-oracles: at Tibur;
      at Preneste—Tree-omens—Legends of speaking trees—Oracle-lots—The
      origin of the divining-rod—Cut rods believed to retain some of the
      divine power resident in the tree—The life-rood—The divining-rod a
      survival of the tree-oracle—Its modern use—Divination by roots and
      leaves                                                           93


                               CHAPTER VI
                           THE UNIVERSE-TREE

  Wide distribution of the conception—Its plausibility to the primitive
      mind; especially to the inhabitants of level countries—Earliest
      version of the world-tree found in an Accadian hymn of great
      antiquity—Probably a poetical amplification of the sacred
      spirit-inhabited tree—The world-tree and the world-mountain—The
      two conceptions combined in the Norse Yggdrasil, as described in
      the Eddas—Indian and Persian versions of the world-tree—Buddhist
      development of the idea—The cosmogony of the Phoenicians—Egyptian
      variants; the Tât-pillar; the golden gem-bearing tree of the
      sky—Traces of the world-tree in Chinese and Japanese mythology—A
      similar tradition amongst North American Indians.

  The Eastern conception of the stars as fruits of the world-tree, and
      as jewels hung thereon—A motive common in Oriental art—The golden
      apples of the Hesperides—Other instances of the world-tree in
      European legend—The monster oak of the Kalevala—Corresponding
      tradition amongst the Esthonians.

  The food of the gods, a conception associated with that of the
      world-tree—The Persian haoma, a mystical tree, producing an
      immortalising juice—Its terrestrial counterpart; the haoma
      sacrament—The Vedic soma; not only a plant but a powerful
      deity—Identification of the plant—De Gubernatis on the soma
      ritual—The effect of the soma drink—Corresponding conceptions
      amongst the Greeks—Origin of the idea                           109


                              CHAPTER VII
                                PARADISE

  Varieties of the tradition: (1) as the seat of the gods; (2) as the
      home of the first parents; (3) as the abode of the blessed—All
      associated with the conception of a mystical tree, in itself an
      idealisation of the spirit-inhabited tree worshipped on earth—The
      paradise of the gods in Indian tradition; its five miraculous
      trees—The paradise of Genesis and of the Persian sacred books—The
      tree of paradise compared with sacred cedar of Chaldaea—paradise
      as the abode of the blessed, a post-exilic tradition amongst the
      Jews—The paradise of the Talmud; and of the Koran—The confusion in
      the ancient traditions of paradise partly due to a limited
      conception of space and to a belief in the propinquity of
      heaven—Greek conceptions of paradise—Milton’s description
      influenced by ancient traditions of an elevated paradise.

  The earthly paradise—Persistence of the tradition; Sir John
      Maundeville’s version—Icelandic tradition—The lost Atlantis of
      Plato a variant of the paradise legend—St. Brandan and the Isle of
      Avalon—Christopher Columbus—Japanese tradition of an island of
      eternal youth, with its marvellous tree—Developments of the idea
      of the tree of paradise—Its representation in art               128


                              CHAPTER VIII
                            MAY CELEBRATIONS

  Their ancient religious significance—The old English May-day—Fetching
      in the May—Puritan condemnation of the May-poles—Their removal “as
      a heathenish vanity”—Existing survivals of May customs—May-day
      rhymes.

  Origin of the celebrations: 1. The bringing in of the May-bough—Wide
      distribution of the custom an evidence of its antiquity—Its
      original intention—“The May” related to the harvest-bush of France
      and Western Germany, and to the Greek _eiresione_—Their common
      purpose, to bring to the house a share of the blessings assumed to
      be at the disposal of the tree-inhabiting spirit.

  2. The May-pole: its primitive intention to bring to the village, as
      the May-bough to the family, the newly-quickened generative
      potency resident in the woods—Wide prevalence of the
      custom—Association of the May-pole with a human image or doll,
      representing the vegetation spirit—The Greek festival of the
      little Daedala—The May-pole, originally renewed every year, became
      later a permanent erection, newly dressed on May-day—Assumed
      beneficent influence of the May-pole.

  3. The May Queen, May Lady, or King and Queen of the May: Evidence
      that these personages were originally regarded as human
      representatives or embodiments of the generalised tree-soul—Often
      associated with its vegetable representative, the tree or bough;
      or clothed in leaves and flowers, _e.g._ the Green George of
      Carinthia and our Jack-in-the-Green—The custom general throughout
      Europe—Robin Hood and Maid Marian originally King and Queen of the
      May—In primitive times the human representative of the vegetation
      spirit probably sacrificed, in order that the spirit might pass to
      a more vigorous successor—Human sacrifice in Mexico—Survival in
      symbol of this ancient custom in Bavaria, Swabia, Saxony, etc.  144


                               CHAPTER IX
                         CHRISTMAS OBSERVANCES

  Distinctly pagan in their origin, and adapted to Christian use under
      the influence of the Church—The Roman Saturnalia—The use of
      mistletoe a direct legacy from the Druids—The decoration of the
      house with evergreens also a Druidic custom.

  The Christmas-tree; its introduction into England extremely recent;
      not universally established in Germany, the land of its origin,
      until the present century—References to it by Goethe and
      Schiller—Earliest record from Strasburg about 1600
      A.D.—Theological disapproval—Theories as to its origin—Probably
      connected with the legend of Christmas flowering
      trees—Examples—The Glastonbury thorn—Mannhardt’s view; a decorated
      tree the recognised scenic symbol of Christmas in the paradise
      play of the Middle Ages, wherein the story of the Fall was
      dramatically associated with that of the Nativity—An ancient
      German custom to force into flower boughs cut on a sacred night
      during the great autumn festival—The date of severance delayed
      under priestly influence so that the boughs might flower at
      Christmas—Instances of the survival of this custom—The lights on
      the Christmas-tree a comparatively recent innovation—Legends of
      light-bearing trees—The lights possibly derived from ancient
      solstitial observances—The Christmas-tree an illustration of the
      blending of pagan and mediaeval ideas—A point in which the many
      phases of tree-worship converge                                 162


  INDEX                                                               175




                             ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                  CHAPTER
 PAGE

  Sacred tree with its supporters, from St. Mark’s, Venice _Frontispiece_

  1, Rudimentary and conventionalised forms of the sacred tree          5

  2,                                                                    5

  3.                                                                    5

  4. Sacred tree with its supporters, surmounted by the winged disc,
      from an Assyrian cylinder                                         6

  5. Sacred tree, from the Temple of Athena at Pryene                   6

  6. The same, from a sculptured slab in the Treasury of St. Mark’s,
      Venice                                                            7

  7. A _Ba_ or soul receiving the lustral water from a tree-goddess    10

  8. Sacred tree with worshippers, from eastern gateway at Sânchi      15

  9. Sacred tree, from a Mexican manuscript                            17

  10. The goddess Nu̔ît in her sacred sycamore bestowing the bread and
      water of the next world                                          26

  11. Sacred tree of Dionysus, with a statue of the god and offerings  27

  12. Sacred pine of Silvanus, with a bust of the god, and votive gifts
                                                                       28

  13. Fruit-tree dressed as Dionysus                                   31

  14, Forms of the Tât or Didû, the emblem of Osiris                   34

  15.                                                                  34

  16. Apollo on his sacred tripod, a laurel branch in his hand         36

  17. Coin of Athens, of the age of Pericles or earlier, showing olive
      spray                                                            38

  18. Coin of Athens, third century B.C.                               38

  19. The Bodhi-tree of Kanaka Muni                                    41

  20. Wild elephants paying their devotions to the sacred banian of
      Kâsyapa Buddha                                                   42

  21. Sacred sycamore, with offerings                                  44

  22. Sacred tree of Artemis, hung with weapons of the chase           45

  23. Sacred laurel of Apollo at Delphi, adorned with fillets and votive
      tablets; beneath it the god appearing to protect Orestes         50

  24. Imperial coin of Myra in Lycia, showing tree-goddess             87

  25. Sacred tree and worshipper, from a Chaldaean cylinder            88

  26. Sacred tree as symbol of fertility, from an Assyrian bas-relief  89

  27. Yggdrasil, the Scandinavian world-tree                          115

  28. From a Babylonian seal                                          130




                               CHAPTER I
                TREE-WORSHIP—ITS DISTRIBUTION AND ORIGIN


It is the purpose of the present volume to deal as concisely as possible
with the many religious observances, popular customs, legends,
traditions and ideas which have sprung from or are related to the
primitive conception of the tree-spirit. There is little doubt that most
if not all races, at some period of their development, have regarded the
tree as the home, haunt, or embodiment of a spiritual essence, capable
of more or less independent life and activity, and able to detach itself
from its material habitat and to appear in human or in animal form. This
belief has left innumerable traces in ancient art and literature, has
largely shaped the usages and legends of the peasantry, and impressed
its influence on the ritual of almost all the primitive religions of
mankind. There is, indeed, scarcely a country in the world where the
tree has not at one time or another been approached with reverence or
with fear, as being closely connected with some spiritual potency.

The evidence upon which this assertion is based is overwhelming in
amount, and is frequently to be found in quarters where until lately its
presence was unsuspected or its significance ignored. For instance, in
the interior of that fascinating storehouse of antiquity, St. Mark’s at
Venice, there are embedded in the walls, high above one’s head, a number
of ancient sculptured slabs, on each of which a conventionalised plant,
with foliage most truthfully and lovingly rendered, is set between two
fabulous monsters, as fantastic and impossible as any supporters to be
met with in the whole range of heraldry (see Frontispiece). To the
ordinary observer these strange sculptures say nothing; probably he
passes over them lightly, as the offspring of that quaint mediaeval
fancy which was so prolific in monstrous births. But the student of
Oriental art at once detects in them a familiar design, a design whose
pedigree can be traced back to the day, six thousand years ago, when the
Chaldaean Semites were taking their culture and religion from the old
Accadians who dwelt on the shores of the Persian Gulf. In the central
plant he recognises the symbol or ideograph of a divine attribute or
activity, if not a representation of the visible embodiment or abode of
a god, and in the raised hand or forepaw of the supporters he discerns
the conventional attitude of adoration. The design, in short, which was
probably handed on from Assyria to Persia, and from Persia to Byzantium,
and so to Venice, is a vestige of that old world religion which regarded
the tree as one of the sacred haunts of deity.

Again, the same conception, the record of which is thus strangely
preserved in the very fabric of a Christian edifice, is to be traced
with equal certainty in the older and scarcely less permanent fabric of
popular tradition and custom. The folk-lore of the modern European
peasant, and the observances with which Christmas, May-day, and the
gathering of the harvest are still celebrated in civilised countries,
are all permeated by the primitive idea that there was a spiritual
essence embodied in vegetation, that trees, like men, had spirits,
passing in and out amongst them, which possessed a mysterious and potent
influence over human affairs, and which it was therefore wise and
necessary to propitiate.

A third example of the less recondite evidence on the subject is to be
found in the Book that we all know best. When we once realise how deeply
rooted and time-honoured was the belief that there was a spiritual force
inherent in vegetation, we cease to wonder at the perversity with which
the less cultured Israelites persisted in planting groves and setting up
altars under every green tree. Read in the light of modern research, the
Old Testament presents a drama of surpassing interest, a record of
internecine struggle between the aspiration of the few towards the
worship of a single, omnipresent, unconditioned God and the conservative
adhesion of the many to the primitive ritual and belief common to all
the Semitic tribes. For the backsliding children of Israel were no more
idolaters, in the usual meaning of the word, than were the Canaanites
whose rites they imitated. Their view of nature was that of the
primitive Semite, if not of the primitive man. All parts of nature, in
their idea, were full of spiritual forces, more or less, but never
completely, detached in their movements and action from the material
objects to which they were supposed properly to belong. “In ritual the
sacred object was spoken of and treated as the god himself; it was not
merely his symbol, but his embodiment, the permanent centre of his
activity, in the same sense in which the human body is the permanent
centre of man’s activity. The god inhabited the tree or sacred stone not
in the sense in which a man inhabits a house, but in the sense in which
his soul inhabits his body.”[1]

To the three classes of evidence, derived respectively from archaeology,
from folk-lore, and from ancient literature, which have been thus
briefly exemplified, may be added a fourth, equally important and
prolific, that namely of contemporary anthropology. Scarcely a book is
printed on the customs of uncivilised races which does not contribute
some new fact to the subject. The illustration of an Arab praying to a
tree, in Slatin Pasha’s recently published volume, is no surprise to the
anthropologist, who has learnt to look for such survivals of primitive
customs wherever culture still remains primitive.

       Rudimentary and conventionalised forms of the sacred tree.
      (From Chaldaean and Assyrian cylinders. Goblet d’Alviella.)

[Illustration: Fig. 1.]

[Illustration: Fig. 2.]

[Illustration: Fig. 3.]

Now of all primitive customs and beliefs there is none which has a
greater claim upon our interest than the worship of the tree, for there
is none which has had a wider distribution throughout the world, or has
left a deeper impress on the traditions and observances of mankind. Its
antiquity is undoubted, for when history begins to speak, we find it
already firmly established amongst the oldest civilised races. What is
probably its earliest record is met with on the engraved cylinders of
Chaldaea, some of which date back to 4000 B.C. Even at that period it
would appear that the Chaldaeans had advanced beyond the stage of crude
tree-worship, as found to this day amongst uncivilised races, for the
sacred tree had already undergone a process of idealisation. In a
bilingual hymn, which is of Accadian origin, and probably one of the
most ancient specimens of literature in existence, a mystical tree is
described as the abode of the gods. And it was probably by a similar
process of idealisation that a conventional representation of the sacred
tree came to be one of the most important symbols of Chaldaean religion.
This symbol, which we have already seen in decorative use on the slabs
at St. Mark’s, appears on the oldest Chaldaean cylinders “as a stem
divided at the base, surmounted by a fork or a crescent, and cut,
midway, by one or more cross bars which sometimes bear a fruit at each
extremity. This rudimentary image frequently changes into the palm, the
pomegranate, the cypress, vine, etc.[2] On the Assyrian monuments of
about 1000 B.C. and later, the figure becomes still more complex and
more artistically conventionalised, and it nearly always stands between
two personages facing each other, who are sometimes priests or kings in
an attitude of adoration, sometimes monstrous creatures, such as are so
often met with in Assyro-Chaldaean imagery, lions, sphinxes, griffins,
unicorns, winged bulls, men or _genii_ with the head of an eagle, and so
forth. Above it is frequently suspended the winged circle, personifying
the supreme deity.” In his exhaustive chapter on this ancient design, M.
Goblet d’Alviella has shown that it obtained a wide dissemination
throughout the world, and is used even to this day in the fictile and
textile art of the East.[3] M. Menant concludes from his exhaustive
study of the cylinders, that the worship of the sacred tree in Assyria
was intimately associated with that of the supreme deity, its symbol
being incontestably one of the most sacred emblems of the Assyrian
religion.[4] M. Lenormant’s view was that the winged circle, in
conjunction with the sacred tree, represented the primeval cosmogonic
pair, the creative sun and the fertile earth, and was a symbol of the
divine mystery of generation.[5] In Babylonia the sacred tree was no
doubt closely associated with Istar, the divine mother, who was
originally not a Semitic, but an Accadian goddess, and whose cult,
together with that of her bridegroom Tammuz, was introduced into
Chaldaea from Eridu, a city which flourished on the shores of the
Persian Gulf between 3000 and 4000 B.C.[6] That the Accadians were
familiar with the worship of the tree may also be inferred from the fact
that their chief god, Ea, was closely associated with the sacred cedar,
on whose core his name was supposed to be inscribed.

[Illustration: Fig. 4.—Sacred tree with its supporters, surmounted by
the winged disc.(From an Assyrian cylinder. Goblet d’Alviella.)]

[Illustration: Fig. 5.—Sacred tree, much conventionalised.(From a
capital of the Temple of Athena at Pryene. Goblet d’Alviella.)]

[Illustration: Fig. 6.—Sacred tree, from a sculptured slab in the
Treasury of St. Mark’s, Venice.]

But however much their attitude towards the sacred tree may have been
modified under Accadian influence, the Chaldaeans in their worship of
the tree only followed the rule of their Semitic kindred, for “the
conception of trees as demoniac beings was familiar to all the Semites,
and the tree was adored as divine in every part of the Semitic area.”[7]
Even that stationary Semite, the modern Arab, holds certain trees
inviolable as being inhabited by spirits, and honours them with
sacrifices and decorations, and to this day the traveller in Palestine
sometimes lights upon holy trees hung with tokens of homage.

This strange persistence of a primitive religion in the very birthplace
of a most exalted spiritual worship is an additional evidence of its
remarkable vitality. For there is no country in the world where the tree
was ever more ardently worshipped than it was in ancient Palestine.
Amongst the Canaanites every altar to the god had its sacred tree beside
it, and when the Israelites established local sanctuaries under their
influence, they set up their altar under a green tree, and planted
beside it as its indispensable accompaniment an _ashêra_, which was
either a living tree or a tree-like post, and not a “grove,” as rendered
in the Authorised Version. This _ashêra_ was undoubtedly worshipped as a
sacred symbol of the deity. Originally it appears to have been
associated with Ashtoreth or Astarte, the Syrian Istar, the revolting
character of whose worship perhaps explains the excessive bitterness of
the biblical denunciations.[8] But the _ashêra_ was also erected by the
altars of other gods, and in pre-prophetic days even beside that of
Jehovah Himself, whence it may be concluded that “in early times
tree-worship had such a vogue in Canaan, that the sacred tree or the
pole, its surrogate, had come to be viewed as a _general_ symbol of
deity.”[9] The great antiquity of the cult in Syria was recognised in
the local traditions, for an old Phoenician cosmogony, quoted by
Eusebius, states that “the first men consecrated the plants shooting out
of the earth, and judged them gods, and worshipped them, and made meat
and drink offerings to them.”[10] In addition to the _ashêra_, the
Chaldaean symbol of the sacred tree between its supporters was also
familiar to the Phoenicians, and is found wherever their art penetrated,
notably in Cyprus and on the archaic pottery of Corinth and Athens.[11]
It is highly probable that both these sacred symbols had a common
origin, but the connection must have been lost sight of in later times,
for we find Ezekiel, to whom the prophetic denunciations of the _ashêra_
must have been familiar, decorating the temple of his vision with
designs evidently derived from the Chaldaean sacred tree, “a palm-tree
between a cherub and a cherub.”[12] A similar ornamentation with
palm-trees and cherubim, it will be remembered, had been used in the
temple built by Solomon.[13]

Amongst the ancient Egyptians, whose “exuberant piety” required,
according to M. Maspero, “an actual rabble of gods” to satisfy it, trees
were enthusiastically worshipped, side by side with other objects, as
the homes of various divinities. The splendid green sycamores, which
flourish here and there as though by miracle on the edge of the
cultivated land, their rootlets bathed by the leakage of the Nile, were
accounted divine and earnestly worshipped by Egyptians of every rank, in
the belief that they were animated by spirits, who on occasion could
emerge from them. They were habitually honoured with fruit offerings,
and the charitable found an outlet for their benevolence in daily
replenishing the water-jars placed beneath them for the use of the
passer-by, who in his turn would express his gratitude for the boon by
reciting a prayer to the deity of the tree. The most famous of these
sycamores—the sycamore of the South—was regarded as the living body of
Hāthor upon earth; and the tree at Metairieh, commonly called the Tree
of the Virgin, is probably the successor of a sacred tree of Heliopolis,
in which a goddess, perhaps Hāthor, was worshipped.[14] The district
around Memphis was known as the Land of the Sycamore, and contained
several trees generally believed to be inhabited by detached doubles of
Nu̔ît and Hāthor. Similar trees are worshipped at the present day both
by Christian and Mussulman fellahîn.

[Illustration: Fig. 7.—A Ba or soul receiving the lustral water from a
tree-goddess.(From a painting discovered by Prof. Petrie at Thebes.
Illustrated London News, 25th July 1896.)]

On the outskirts of the province of Darfur the Bedeyat Arabs, though
surrounded by Moslem tribes, still adhere to the same primitive cult.
Under the wide-spreading branches of an enormous heglik-tree, and on a
spot kept beautifully clean and sprinkled with fine sand, they beseech
an unknown god to direct them in their undertakings and to protect them
from danger.[15] They have, in short, retained, in spite of the pressure
of Islamism, the old heathen worship which still widely prevails amongst
the uncivilised races of the African continent. Thus on the Guinea Coast
almost every village has its sacred tree, and in some parts offerings
are still made to them. The negroes of the Congo plant a sacred tree
before their houses and set jars of palm-wine under it for the
tree-spirit.[16] In Dahomey prayers and gifts are offered to trees in
time of sickness. One of the goddesses of the Fantis has her abode in
huge cotton-trees. In the Nyassa country, where the spirits of the dead
are worshipped as gods, the ceremonies are conducted and offerings
placed not at the grave of the dead man, but at the foot of the tree
which grows before his house, or if that be unsuitable, beneath some
especially beautiful tree selected for the purpose.[17]

To return to ancient Egypt, there is evidence that the great Osiris was
originally a tree-god. According to Egyptian mythology, after he had
been murdered his coffin was discovered enclosed in a tree-trunk, and he
is spoken of in the inscriptions as “the one in the tree,” “the solitary
one in the acacia.” The rites, too, by which his death and burial were
annually celebrated appear to couple him closely with Tammuz, Adonis,
Attis, Dionysus, and other gods whose worship was associated with a
similar ritual.[18] Mr. Frazer, following Mannhardt, contends that all
these deities were tree-gods, and that the ceremonial connected with
their worship was symbolical of the annual death and revival of
vegetation. It is certainly true that in Babylonia, Egypt, Phoenicia,
and above all in Phrygia, a peculiarly emotional form of worship, which
subsequently extended to Cyprus, Crete, Greece, and Italy, arose in
connection with deities who were closely associated with vegetable life.
Tammuz—

  Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
  The Syrian damsels to lament his fate,

and for whose resuscitation his bride, the goddess Istar, descended into
Hades—was represented as originally dwelling in a tree.[19] Adonis, who
was the beloved of Aphrodite—the Syrian Astarte—and is Tammuz under
another name, was born from a myrrh-tree. Attis, the favourite of
Cybele, who was worshipped with barbarous rites in Phrygia, was
represented in the form of a decorated pine-tree, to which his image was
attached. Dionysus, whose death and resurrection were celebrated in
Crete and elsewhere, was worshipped throughout Greece as “Dionysus of
the Tree.” These facts are sufficient to warrant the inference that
tree-worship was very firmly rooted in those regions where the Semitic
races came into contact with the Aryans. In Phrygia it was peculiarly
prominent, as we know from classical references. The archaeological
evidence is vague and incomplete, but a characteristic device frequent
in Phrygian art, in which two animals, usually lions rampant, face one
another on either side of a pillar, or an archaic representation of the
mother-goddess Cybele,[20] recalls the sacred tree of Babylonia. The
device is familiar in connection with the lion-gate of Mycenae, which
was probably erected under Phrygian influence.

The Persians venerated trees as the dwelling-place of the deity, as the
haunts of good and evil spirits, and as the habitations in which the
souls of heroes and of the virtuous dead continued their existence.
According to Plutarch, they assigned some trees and plants to the good
God, others to the evil demon.[21] The Zend-Avesta ordained that the
trees which Ormuzd had given should be prayed to as pure and holy, and
adored with fire and lustral water;[22] and according to tradition, when
Zoroaster died, Ormuzd himself translated his soul into a lofty tree,
and planted it upon a high mountain. The cypress was regarded by the
Persians as especially sacred. It was closely associated with
fire-worship, and was revered as a symbol of the pure light of Ormuzd.
It is frequently represented on ancient gravestones in conjunction with
the lion, the symbol of the sun-god Mithra.[23] Another venerated tree
was the myrtle, a branch of which was used as an essential accompaniment
in all religious functions. The observances connected with the Persian
worship of the Haoma plant will be dealt with in a later chapter. The
Achaemenian kings regarded the plane as their peculiar tree, and a
representation of it in gold formed part of their state. A certain
plane-tree in Lydia was presented by Xerxes with vessels of gold and
costly apparel, and committed to the guardianship of one of his
“immortals.”[24]

In India, where tree-worship once enjoyed a wide prevalence, it has left
indubitable traces on the religions which displaced it, and it is still
encountered in its crudest form amongst some of the aboriginal hill
tribes. The Garrows, for instance, who possess neither temples nor
altars, set up a bamboo before their huts, and sacrifice before it to
their deity.[25] On a mountain in Travancore there existed until quite
recently an ancient tree, which was regarded by the natives as the
residence of a powerful deity. Sacrifices were offered to it, and
sermons preached before it; it served, indeed, as the cathedral of the
district. At length, to the horror of its worshippers, an English
missionary had it cut down and used in the construction of a chapel on
its site.[26] The ancient prevalence of tree-worship in India is
established by frequent references to sacred trees in the Vedas, and by
the statement of Q. Curtius that the companions of Alexander the Great
noticed that the Indians “reputed as gods whatever they held in
reverence, especially trees, which it was death to injure.”[27] This
ancient reverence for the tree was recognised by Buddhism, and adapted
to its more advanced mode of thought. The asvattha or pippala-tree,
_Ficus Religiosa_, which had previously been identified with the supreme
deity, Brahma, came to be venerated above all others by the special
injunction of Gautama, as that under which he had achieved perfect
knowledge.[28] In his previous incarnations Gautama himself is
represented as having been a tree-spirit no less than forty-three times.
The evidence of the monuments as to the importance attached to the tree
in early Buddhism is equally definite. The Sânchi and Ama-ravati
sculptures, some casts of which are in the British Museum, contain
representations of the sacred tree decorated with garlands and
surrounded by votaries, whilst the worship of the trees identified with
the various Buddhas is repeatedly represented on the Stûpa of Bharhut.

[Illustration: Fig. 8.—Sacred tree with worshippers, from eastern
gateway of Buddhist Tope at Sânchi.(Fergusson’s Tree and Serpent Worship
(1868), Plate xxv.)]

There is very little evidence of the existence of tree-worship amongst
the Chinese, but they have a tradition of a Tree of Life, and of a drink
of immortality made from various sacred plants. They also make use of
the divining-rod, which is an offshoot of tree-worship, and certain
Taoist medals, like the talismans worn in Java, bear the familiar symbol
of the sacred tree.[29] In Japan certain old trees growing near Shinto
temples are regarded as sacred, and bound with a fillet of straw rope,
“as if they were tenanted by a divine spirit.”[30] Japanese mythology
tells of holy _sakaki_ trees growing on the Mountain of Heaven, and of a
herb of immortality to be gathered on the Island of Eternal Youth.

Amongst the semi-civilised races which border upon these ancient states
the tree is still almost universally regarded as the dwelling-place of a
spirit, and as such is protected, venerated, and often presented with
offerings. In Sumatra and Borneo certain old trees are held to be
sacred, and the Dyaks would regard their destruction as an impious act.
The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula believe that trees are inhabited by
terrible spirits capable of inflicting diseases. The Talein of Burmah
never cut down a tree without a prayer to the indwelling spirit. The
Siamese have such veneration for the takhien-tree that they offer it
cakes and rice before felling it; so strong, indeed, is their dread of
destroying trees of any kind, and thereby offending the gods inhabiting
them, that all necessary tree-felling is relegated to the lowest
criminals. Even at the present day they frequently make offerings to the
tree-dwelling spirits, and hang gifts on any tree whose deity they
desire to propitiate.[31]

In the Western Hemisphere, the fact that the drawing of a tree with two
opposed personages or supporters, similar in design to the sacred tree
of the Chaldaeans, has been found in an ancient Mexican MS., has been
put forward as an additional argument in favour of the pre-Columbian
colonisation of that continent and its early contact with the Eastern
world.[32] Speaking generally, however, the worship of the tree appears
to have flourished less widely in the New World than the Old, though
traces of it have been found all over the continent.[33] A large
ash-tree is regarded with great veneration by the Indians of Lake
Superior, and in Mexico there was a cypress, the spreading branches of
which were loaded by the natives with votive offerings, locks of hair,
teeth, and morsels of ribbon; it was many centuries old, and had
probably had mysterious influence ascribed to it, and been decorated
with offerings long before the discovery of America.[34] By that date,
however, the Mexicans had apparently advanced beyond the earliest stage
of religious development, and expanded the idea of individual
tree-spirits into the more general conception of a god of vegetation. It
was in the honour of such a god that their May-Day celebrations were
held and their human sacrifices offered. In Nicaragua cereals were
worshipped as well as trees. In more primitive Patagonia the cruder form
of worship persists, a certain tree standing upon a hill being still
resorted to by numerous worshippers, each of whom brings his offering.

[Illustration: Fig. 9.—From a Mexican manuscript.(Goblet d’Alviella.)]

To return nearer home, the worship of the tree has prevailed at one time
or another in every country of Europe. It played a vital part in the
religion of Greece and Rome, and classical literature is full of
traditions and ideas which can have been derived from no other source.
The subject has been exhaustively treated by Bötticher in his
_Baumkultus der Hellenen_.[35] Mr. Farnell, in his recently published
work, says that in the earliest period of Greek religion of which we
have any record, the tree was worshipped as the shrine of the divinity
that housed within it; hence the epithet ἔνδενδρος, applied to Zeus, and
the legend of Helene Dendritis.[36] Discoveries made in Crete and the
Peloponnese within the present year (1896) seem to show that the worship
of deities in aniconic shape as stone pillars or as trees played a great
part in the religion of the Mycenaean period about 1500 B.C.[37] The
persistent belief of the Greek and Roman peasantry in the existence and
power of the various woodland spirits is also vitally connected with the
primitive idea of the tree-soul.

In the centre of Europe, covered as it once was with dense forest, the
veneration of the tree tinctured all the religious usages of the
primitive inhabitants. In ancient Germany, the universal ceremonial
religion of the people had its abode in the “_grove_,” and the earliest
efforts of the Christian missionaries were directed towards the
destruction of these venerated woods, or their consecration by the
erection within them of a Christian edifice.[38] But long after their
nominal conversion the Germans continued to people every wood with
spirits, and the legends and folk-lore of their modern descendants are
still rich in memories of this time-honoured superstition. Some of these
wood-inhabiting spirits were favourable to man, ready to befriend and
help him in difficulty; others were malicious and vindictive. The whole
subject has been studied in Germany with characteristic thoroughness,
the standard work being Mannhardt’s well-known and fascinating _Wald-
und Feldkulte_.[39]

In Poland trees appear to have been worshipped as late as the fourteenth
century, and in parts of Russia the power of the tree-spirit over the
herds was so firmly held, that it was long customary to propitiate it by
the sacrifice of a cow. The Permians, a tribe related to the Finns,
worshipped trees, among other things, until their conversion to
Christianity about 1380 A.D.[40] In parts of Esthonia the peasants even
within the present century regarded certain trees as sacred, carefully
protected them, hung them with wreaths, and once a year poured fresh
bullock’s blood about their roots, in order that the cattle might
thrive.[41] In the remoter parts of the Czar’s domain the belief in
tree-demons still persists. They are held to be enormous creatures, who
can change their stature at will, and whose voice is heard in the clash
of the storm as they spring from tree to tree. In Finland the oak is
still called “God’s tree,” and to this day the birch and the
mountain-ash are held sacred by the peasants, and planted beside their
cottages with every sign of reverence.

In France at Massilia (now Marseilles) human sacrifices were, in
primitive times, offered to trees.[42] In the fourth century of our era
there was a famous pear-tree at Auxerre which was hung with trophies of
the chase and paid all the veneration due to a god.[43] In the life of
St. Amandus mention is made of sacred groves and trees worshipped near
Beauvais, and various Church councils in the early middle ages denounced
those who venerated trees, one held at Nantes in 895 A.D. expressly
enjoining the destruction of trees which were consecrated to demons.
Traces of the ancient worship still survive here as elsewhere in popular
custom; in the south of France they have a graceful observance, in which
the spirit of vegetation is personified by a youth clad in green, who
feigning sleep is awakened by a maiden’s kiss.

In our own islands, as every one knows, the oak-tree played a salient
part in the old Druidical worship, and Pliny[44] even derives the name
Druid fromδρῦς, an oak, as some still connect it with _darach_, the
Celtic word for that tree. The important rites with which the mistletoe
was severed from the parent tree and dedicated at the altar furnish
evidence of the veneration paid to the spirit of the tree, who,
according to the teaching of the Druids, retreated into the
parasite-bough when the oak leaves withered. The Teutons no doubt
brought with them to Britain the religion of the sacred grove, and we
find King Edgar condemning the idle rites in connection with the alder
and other trees, and Canute fifty years later forbidding the worship
entirely.[45] The ceremonies once connected with the worship of the tree
survived in the form of a picturesque symbolism long after their origin
had been forgotten. In 1515, at a Twelfth-Night pageant held at his
palace of Greenwich by order of Henry VIII., tree-spirits represented by
“VIII wylde-men, all apparayled in grene mosse sodainly came oute of a
place lyke a wood” and engaged in battle with the royal knights.[46] It
was also a custom of this king in the early years of his reign to resort
to the woods with a richly-apparelled retinue in order “to fetche May or
grene bows,”—the spirit of vegetation, whose renewed vigour was
symbolised, unconsciously no doubt, in the green boughs with which the
courtiers decked their caps.[47] May-day ceremonies to celebrate the new
life in the forest can be traced in England as far back as the
thirteenth century, and the importance still attached to them by the
people as late as the seventeenth century is indicated by the rancour
with which the Puritans attacked the Maypole, “a heathenish vanity
greatly abused to superstition and wickedness.” These and other
survivals will be more fully treated in a later chapter, and are only
mentioned here as showing the ancient prevalence of a belief in
tree-spirits, which indeed is alone competent to account for such
customs.

In fine, no one who has not studied the subject can have any idea of the
sanctity associated with the tree amongst pre-Christian nations. The
general conclusion which Bötticher gives as the result of his elaborate
research, is that the worship of the tree was not only the earliest form
of divine ritual, but was the last to disappear before the spread of
Christianity; it existed long before the erection of temples and statues
to the gods, flourished side by side with them, and persisted long after
they had disappeared.[48] Mr. Tylor, with greater caution, concludes
that _direct and absolute tree-worship_ may lie very wide and deep in
the early history of religion, but that apart from this “there is a wide
range of animistic conceptions connected with tree and forest worship.
The tree may be the spirit’s perch, or shelter, or favourite haunt; or
may serve as a scaffold or altar, where offerings can be set out for
some spiritual being; or its shelter may be a place of worship set apart
by nature, of some tribes the only temple, of many tribes, perhaps, the
earliest; or lastly, it may be merely a sacred object patronised by, or
associated with, or symbolising some divinity.”[49] These varied
conceptions, Mr. Tylor thinks, conform, in spite of their confusion, to
the animistic theology in which they all have their essential
principles.

To discuss the origin of tree-worship would involve the consideration of
the whole question of primitive culture, the theory of animism, and the
subject of ancestor worship, together with a digression on the very
obscure problem of totemism. The last word has not yet been said on
these questions, and the time has certainly not yet come to say it. As
will be shown in the next two chapters, the general conception of the
tree-spirit includes at least two different series of ideas, that on the
one hand of the tree-god, whose worship became organised into a definite
religion, and on the other hand that of the tree-demons or tree-spirits,
whose propitiation was degraded into or never rose above the level of
sorcery and incantation. To define the relation between these two
conceptions is extremely difficult, and it has been approached by
different writers along two different lines of thought. Either the gods
were developed from the spiritual forces assumed by primitive man to be
inherent in nature, and gradually differentiated from the less friendly
powers embodied in the various demons, until they came to be regarded as
the kinsmen and parents of their worshippers; or they were ancestral
spirits, at once feared and trusted from their very origin by their
kinsmen, whilst all the class of minor spirits and demons were but
degenerate gods or the ancestral spirits of enemies. The former view is
put forward by Professor Robertson Smith, in a chapter that deserves
most careful study, but he admits that it is difficult to understand how
the friendly powers of nature that haunted a district in which men lived
and prospered, and were regarded as embodied in holy trees and springs,
became identified with the tribal god of a community and the parent of a
race.[50] There is no such difficulty in Mr. Herbert Spencer’s theory
that all religion arose from ancestor worship, or in Mr. Grant Allen’s
supplementary contention that trees and stones came to be regarded as
sacred and to be honoured with sacrifices because they were originally
associated with the ancestral grave, and were hence assumed to have
become the haunts or embodiments of the ancestral spirit.[51] This
latter view, however, does not seem to take sufficient account of the
thousand spirits who, in the belief of primitive men, thronged the
woods, the mountains, and the springs, and appeared in horrible animal
or semi-human form. Probably the truth lies between the two theories,
and the primitive worship of the tree had more than one root.




                               CHAPTER II
                          THE GOD AND THE TREE


When we examine more closely the spiritual beings who have been thought
to haunt or inhabit vegetation, we find that they fall more or less
distinctly into two classes—into tree-gods on the one hand, and on the
other into the various tree-demons, wood-spirits, dryads, elves, jinns,
and fabulous monsters common to the mythology of all countries. There
is, perhaps, no absolutely definite line of demarcation between the two
classes, for primitive thought does not deal in sharp definitions. But
the division, besides being convenient for our present purpose, is a
vital one. For a god is an individual spirit who enters into stated
relations with man, is mostly if not invariably regarded as akin to his
worshippers, and is presumably their friend, ally, and protector.
Whereas the demon is an independent and, as a rule, not individualised
spirit, without human kinship, and for the most part unfriendly to man.
The god is to be revered, approached and called upon by name; the demon,
as a rule, to be dreaded and shunned. The present chapter will be
devoted to the belief in the tree-inhabiting god.

The conception of an ubiquitous, unconditioned spirit is entirely
foreign to primitive thought. All the gods of antiquity were subject to
physical limitations. Those even of Greece and Rome were by no means
independent of a material environment. There was always some holy place
or sanctuary, some grove, tree, stone, or fountain, or later on some
temple or image, wherein the god was assumed to dwell, and through which
he had to be approached. To Moses Jehovah is “He that dwelt in the
bush,”[52] and centuries later Cyrus, while admitting that the Lord of
Israel had made him king of the whole world, yet speaks of Him as “the
Lord that dwelleth in Jerusalem.”[53] Very frequently, especially in
early times, this home or haunt of the god was a tree; his ceremonial
worship was conducted beneath its shadow, and the offerings of his
worshippers were hung upon its branches, or placed at its foot, or upon
a table by its side, and assumed thereby to have reached the god. Thus
the sacred sycamores of Egypt were believed to be actually inhabited by
Hāthor, Nu̔ît, Selkît, Nît, or some other deity, and were worshipped and
presented with offerings as such. The vignettes in the _Book of the
Dead_ demonstrate this belief unmistakably. They frequently depict the
soul on its journey to the next world coming to one of these miraculous
sycamores on the edge of the terrible desert before it, and receiving
from the goddess of the tree a supply of bread, fruit, or water, the
acceptance of which made it the guest of the deity and prevented it from
retracing its steps without her express permission. “O, sycamore of the
Goddess Nu̔ît,” begins one of the chapters in the _Book of the Dead_,
“let there be given to me the water which is in thee.” As a rule in the
vignettes the bust of the goddess is represented as appearing from
amidst the sheltering foliage, but sometimes only her arm is seen
emerging from the leaves with a libation-bowl in the hand. The
conception is illustrated still more clearly on an ancient sarcophagus
in the Marseilles Museum, where the trunk from which the branches spread
is represented as the actual body of the deity.[54]

[Illustration: Fig. 10.—The goddess Nu̔ît in her sacred sycamore
bestowing the bread and water of the next world.(Maspero, Dawn of
Civilisation.)]

[Illustration: Fig. 11.—Sacred tree of Dionysus, with a statue of the
god and offerings.(Bötticher, Fig. 24.)]

As man’s conception of the deity became more definitely anthropomorphic
on the one hand and less local on the other, this primitive
representation of the god in the tree underwent a change in two
corresponding directions. In the one case an attempt was made to express
more clearly the manlike form of the god; the tree was dressed or carved
in human semblance, or a mask or statue of the god was hung upon or
placed beside it. In the other case, as the god widened his territory or
absorbed other local gods he became associated with all trees of a
certain class, and was assumed to dwell not in a particular tree, but in
a particular kind of tree, which thenceforward became sacred to and
symbolical of him. This latter idea received special development in the
religions of Greece and Rome. But in the early history of both those
countries cases occur in which a god was worshipped in an individual
tree. At Dodona, which was perhaps the most ancient of all Greek
sanctuaries, Zeus was approached as immanent in his sacred oak, and
legendary afterthought explained the primitive ritual by relating that
the first oak sprang from the blood of a Titan slain while invading the
abode of the god, who thereupon chose it as his own peculiar tree.
Again, in ancient Rome, according to Livy, Jupiter was originally
worshipped in the form of a lofty oak-tree which grew upon the Capitol.
The same was probably true of other gods at their first appearance.
Amongst the Greeks, indeed, the tree was the earliest symbol or ἄγαλµα
of the god, and as such is frequently represented on ancient vases,
marble tablets, silver vessels, and wall-paintings. Indeed, the solitary
tree standing in Attic fields and worshipped as the sacred habitation of
a god was in all probability the earliest Greek temple, the forerunner
of those marvellous edifices which have aroused the admiration of every
subsequent age; whilst the elaborate worship of which those temples
became the home was presumably based upon a ceremonial originally
connected with the worship of the tree.

[Illustration: Fig. 12.—Sacred pine of Silvanus, with a bust of the god,
and votive gifts represented by a bale of merchandise and a Mercury’s
staff.(Bötticher, Fig 18.)]

According to Mr. Farnell, the latest writer on the subject, the chief
gods of the Greeks were in their origin deities of vegetation, the
special attributes which we associate with them being subsequent
accretions. The pre-Hellenic Cronos gave his name to an Attic
harvest-festival held in July, and his ancient emblem was the
sickle.[55] Zeus, besides being the oak-god of Dodona, was worshipped in
Attica as a god of agriculture and honoured with cereal offerings.[56]
Artemis was not primarily a goddess of chastity, nor a moon-goddess, nor
the twin-sister of Apollo, but an independent divinity, closely related
to the wood-nymphs, and connected with water and with wild vegetation
and forest beasts. She was worshipped in Arcadia as the goddess of the
nut-tree and the cedar, and in Laconia as the goddess of the laurel and
the myrtle. Her idol at Sparta was said to have been found in a willow
brake, bound round with withies. At Teuthea in Achaea she was worshipped
as the goddess of the woodland pasture, and at Cnidus as the nurturer of
the hyacinth.[57] In the legend of the colonisation of Boiae she was
represented as embodied in a hare which suddenly disappeared in a
myrtle-tree.[58] But her character as a tree-goddess comes out still
more clearly in the cult of the “hanging Artemis” at Kaphyae in
Arcadia,[59] which no doubt grew out of the primitive custom of
suspending a mask or image of the vegetation spirit to the sacred tree.

The association of Hera with tree-worship is less pronounced. She was
said to have been born under a willow-tree at Samos, and her worship in
that island was characterised by a yearly ceremony in which her
priestess secreted her idol in a willow brake, where it was subsequently
rediscovered and honoured with an oblation of cakes.[60] In Argos she
was worshipped as the deity who gave the fruits of the earth, and as
such was represented with a pomegranate in her hand. It is also worthy
of note that the familiar symbol of a conventionalised tree between two
griffins appears on the stephanos or coronet of the goddess on coins of
Croton of the fourth century, and of certain South Italian cities, as
well as on a colossal bust now at Venice, which, like the head on the
coins, was presumably copied from the temple-image at Croton.[61]

Aphrodite was not a primitive Greek deity, but her connection with
vegetative life is abundantly clear. She was, in fact, but a Hellenised
variant of the great Oriental goddess, worshipped in different parts as
Istar, Astarte, Cybele, etc., who was essentially a divinity of
vegetation.[62]

This primitive connection of the gods of Greece with vegetative life was
lost sight of in their later developments. Even at the date of the
Homeric poems the more advanced of the Greeks had evidently arrived at
“a highly developed structure of religious thought, showing us clear-cut
personal divinities with ethical and spiritual attributes.”[63] But the
older and cruder ideas of the nature of the gods left a persistent trace
in the ritual with which they were worshipped, as well as in the designs
of the artists who reflected the popular traditions. Thus the ancient
custom of burning incense before the tree, decking it with consecrated
fillets, and honouring it with burnt offerings, survived long after the
belief of which it was the natural development had decayed. A sculpture
preserved in the Berlin Museum represents the holy pine-tree of Pan
adorned with wreaths and fillets. An image of Pan is near, and offerings
are being brought to an altar placed beneath it. Again, Theocritus
describes how at the consecration of Helen’s plane-tree at Sparta, the
choir of Lacedaemonian maidens hung consecrated wreaths of lotus flowers
upon the tree, anointed it with costly spikenard, and attached to it the
dedicatory placard: “Honour me, all ye that pass by, for I am Helen’s
tree.”[64]

[Illustration: Fig. 13.—Fruit-tree dressed as Dionysus.(Bötticher, Fig.
44.)]

The practice of giving the tree a human semblance, by clothing it in
garments or carving its stump in human form, was the natural result of
this worship amongst an artistic race, groping its way towards a
concrete expression of its ideas. It represented the crude strivings of
a people who, in their attempts to create gods in their own image,
eventually produced an unsurpassable ideal of human grace and beauty.
From the rudely carved tree-stump arose in due time the Hermes of
Praxiteles. Bötticher reproduces several ancient designs in which the
trunk of a tree is dressed as Dionysus. In one of these a mask is
fastened at the top of the trunk in such a way that the branches appear
to grow from the head of the god, and the trunk itself is clothed with a
long garment; a table, or altar, loaded with gifts, stands beside
it.[65]

In other cases, probably where the worshipped tree had died, its trunk
or branches were rudely carved into an image of the god, and either left
_in situ_, or hewn down and placed near the temple or, later, in the
very temple itself. Both Pausanias and Pliny state that the oldest
images of the gods were made of wood, and several Latin authors refer to
the custom of thus carving the branches of auspicious trees (_felicium
arborum_) as prevalent in primitive times amongst the Greeks.[66] The
ἄγαλµα or emblem of Aphrodite, dedicated by Pelops, was wrought out of a
fresh verdant myrtle-tree. At Samos a board was the emblem of Hera; two
wooden stocks joined together by a cross-piece was the sign of the
twin-brethren at Sparta, and a wooden column encircled with ivy was
consecrated to Dionysus at Thebes.[67]

It may be fairly assumed that in cases such as these the worshippers
believed that the dead piece of wood retained some at least of the power
originally attributed to the spirit dwelling in the living tree. Their
idolatry was but a childish deduction from an ancient and deeply-rooted
theology. The same may be said for the wood-cutter, derided in the
Apocrypha, who, “taking a crooked piece of wood and full of knots,
carveth it with the diligence of his idleness, and shapeth it by the
skill of his indolence; then he giveth it the semblance of the image of
a man, smearing it with vermilion and with paint colouring it red; and
having made for it a chamber worthy of it, he setteth it in a wall,
making it fast with iron.”[68] Side by side with this foolish
wood-cutter, who “for life beseecheth that which is dead,” may be placed
the Sicilian peasant whom Theocritus represents as offering sacrifice to
a carved Pan. “When thou hast turned yonder lane, goatherd, where the
oak-trees are, thou wilt find an image of fig-tree wood newly carven;
three legged it is, the bark still covers it, and it is earless withal.
A right holy precinct runs round it, and a ceaseless stream that falleth
from the rocks on every side is green with laurels and myrtles and
fragrant cypress. And all around the place that child of the grape, the
vine, doth flourish with its tendrils, and the merles in spring with
their sweet songs pour forth their woodnotes wild, and the brown
nightingales reply with their complaints, pouring from their bills their
honey sweet song.”[69]

This crude worship of the god in the anthropomorphised tree lingered on
amongst the peasantry side by side with the splendid temple ritual, even
into days when the revelation of a Deity who filled all time and space,
and was worshipped in temples not made with hands, was rapidly
undermining the pagan worship of the cities. Maximus Tyrius, who lived
in the second century A.D., and counted among his most diligent pupils
the great Marcus Aurelius, relates how even in his day at the festival
of Dionysus every peasant selected the most beautiful tree in his garden
to convert it into an image of the god and to worship it.[70] And
Apuleius, another writer of the same period, bears similar testimony.
“It is the custom,” he says, “of pious travellers, when their way passes
a grove or holy place, that they offer up a prayer for the fulfilment of
their wishes, offer gifts and remain there a time; so I, when I set foot
in that most sacred city, although in haste, must crave for a pardon,
offer a prayer and moderate my haste. For never was traveller more
justified in making a religious pause, when he perchance shall have come
upon a flower-wreathed altar, a grotto covered with boughs, an oak
decorated with many horns, or a beech-tree with skins hung to it, a
little sacred hill fenced around, or a _tree trunk hewn as an image_
(_truncus dolamine effigatus_).”[71]

            Forms of the Tât or Didû, the emblem of Osiris.
                         (Maspero, _op. cit._)

[Illustration: Fig. 14.]

[Illustration: Fig. 15.]

This custom of carving a tree into the semblance of a god, and
subsequently worshipping it as his sanctuary or symbol, was current in
many parts of the world. The chief idol form of Osiris, the Didû or Tât,
is believed by Maspero to have originated as a simple tree-trunk
disbranched and planted in the ground.[72] Usually it is represented
with a grotesque face, beneath four superimposed capitals, with a
necklace round its neck, a long robe hiding the base of the column in
its folds, and the whole surmounted by the familiar Osirian emblems.

Again, it is said to have been a practice amongst the Druids, when an
oak died to strip off its bark and shape it into a pillar, pyramid, or
cross, and continue to worship it as an emblem of the god.[73] The cross
especially was a favourite form, and any oak with two principal branches
forming a cross with the main stem was consecrated by a sacred
inscription, and from that time forward regarded with particular
reverence.

The same custom prevailed in India. In the seventeenth century there
existed near Surat a sacred banian-tree, supposed to be 3000 years old,
which the Hindus would never cut or touch with steel for fear of
offending the god concealed in its foliage. They made pilgrimages to it
and honoured it with religious ceremonies. On its trunk at a little
distance from the ground a head had been roughly carved, painted in gay
colours, and furnished with gold and silver eyes. This simulacrum was
constantly adorned with fresh foliage and flowers, the withered leaves
which they replaced being distributed amongst the pilgrims as pious
souvenirs.[74]

It was predominantly, though by no means exclusively, a Greek
development to associate a particular god with a particular variety of
tree. The oak, excelling all others in majestic strength and inherent
vigour, became the emblem and embodiment of Zeus. The connection arose
in all probability from the primitive worship of the Pelasgic Zeus in
the oak grove of Dodona, but in classical times it was accepted
throughout Greece. On coins and in other works of art the god is
frequently represented as crowned with oak leaves, or as standing or
sitting beside an oak-tree.[75] To have partaken of the acorns of Zeus
was a vernacular expression for having acquired wisdom and knowledge.
This especial sanctity of the oak as the tree of the father of the gods
passed into Italy, and Virgil speaks of it as—

                            Jove’s own tree
  That holds the world in awful sovereignty.

[Illustration: Fig. 16.—Apollo on his sacred tripod, a laurel branch in
his hand.(From a coin, probably of Delphi.)]

More sacred even than the oak to Zeus was the laurel to Apollo. No
sanctuary of his was complete without it; none could be founded where
the soil was unfavourable to its growth. No worshipper could share in
his rites who had not a crown of laurel on his head or a branch in his
hand. As endowed with the power of the god, who was at once the prophet,
poet, redeemer, and protector of his people, the laurel assumed an
important and many-sided rôle in ceremonial symbolism.[76] The staff of
laurel in the hand of the reciting poet was assumed to assist his
inspiration, in the hand of the prophet or diviner to help him to see
hidden things. Thus the use of the laurel played an essential part in
the oracular ceremonial of Delphi. Everywhere, in short, the bearing of
the laurel bough was the surest way to the god’s protection and favour.
The conception was slow to die. Clement, writing about 200 A.D., still
finds the warning necessary that “one must not hope to obtain
reconciliation with God by means of laurel branches adorned with red and
white ribbons.”[77]

By an easy transition the laurel became sacred also to Aesculapius. As
the source at once of a valuable remedy and a deadly poison, it was held
in high esteem by Greek physicians. It was popularly believed that
spirits could be cast out by its means, and it was usual to affix a
laurel bough over the doorway in cases of serious illness, in order to
avert death and keep evil spirits at bay.[78]

The ceremonial use of the laurel passed from Greece into Italy. When the
Sibylline books were consulted at Rome, the laurel of prophecy always
adorned the chair of the priest.[79] Victors were crowned with laurel,
and in Roman triumphs the soldiers decked their spears and helmets with
its leaves.

The tree of Aphrodite was the myrtle.[80] It was held to have the power
both of creating and of perpetuating love, and hence from the earliest
times was used in marriage ceremonies. In the Eleusinian mysteries the
initiates crowned themselves with the oak leaves of Zeus and the myrtle
of Aphrodite. The Graces, her attendants, were represented as wearing
myrtle chaplets, and her worshippers crowned themselves with myrtle
sprays. At Rome Venus was worshipped under the name of Myrtea in her
temple at the foot of the Aventine. The apple-tree held a subsidiary but
yet important place in the cult of Aphrodite. Its fruit was regarded as
an appropriate offering to her and, according to Theocritus, played its
part in love games.[81] The apples of Atalanta had no doubt a symbolical
significance.

[Illustration: Fig. 17.—Coin of Athens, of the age of Pericles or
earlier, showing olive spray.]

[Illustration: Fig. 18.—Coin of Athens, third century B.C.]

Athena also had her special tree. According to mythology she sprang
fully armed from the head of Zeus, but research into the origins of the
gods makes it much more probable that her true pedigree was from the
olive, which grew wild upon the Athenian Acropolis, the chief seat of
her worship. Mr. M‘Lennan even inclined to regard the olive as
originally the totem of the Athenians.[82] At any rate their connection
with that tree dates from an ancient time. “The produce of the
olive-tree had an almost religious value for the men of Attica, and the
physical side of Greek civilisation much depended on it.”[83] From the
era of Pericles onwards the coins of Athens were stamped with the
olive-branch, amongst other usual accompaniments of the tutelary
goddess. Every sanctuary and temple of Athena had its sacred olive-tree,
which was regarded as the symbol of the divine peace and protection.
Naturally a legend arose to explain the connection. Athena and Poseidon,
being at variance as to which of them should name the newly-founded city
of Athens, referred the question to the gods, who in general assembly
decreed the privilege to that claimant who should give the most useful
present to the inhabitants of earth. Poseidon struck the ground with his
trident and a horse sprang forth. But Athena “revealed the spray of the
gray-green olive, a divine crown and glory for bright Athens.”[84] And
the gods decided that the olive, as the emblem of peace, was a higher
gift to man than the horse, which was the symbol of war. So Athena named
the city after herself and became its protectress. This myth, which,
according to Mr. Farnell, is one of the very few creation-myths in Greek
folk-lore, was a favourite subject in art, and is frequently represented
on late Attic coins.[85]

Other gods had their sacred trees: Dionysus, the vine; Dis and
Persephone, the poplar, which was supposed to grow on the banks of
Acheron. The cypress, called by Greeks and Romans alike the “mournful
tree,” was also sacred to the rulers of the underworld, and to their
associates, the Fates and Furies. As such it was customary to plant it
by the grave, and, in the event of a death, to place it either before
the house or in the vestibule, in order to warn those about to perform a
sacred rite against entering a place polluted by a dead body.[86]

In regard to the number of trees which they held sacred the Semitic
nations rivalled the Greeks. They venerated “the pines and cedars of
Lebanon, the evergreen oaks of the Palestinian hills, the tamarisks of
the Syrian jungles, the acacias of the Arabian wadies,” besides such
cultivated trees as the palm, the olive, and the vine. But there is no
clear evidence to prove that they ever coupled a particular species of
tree with a particular god. In Phoenicia the cypress was sacred to
Astarte, but it was equally connected with the god Melcarth, who was
believed to have planted the cypress-trees at Daphne. “If a tree
belonged to a particular deity, it was not because it was of a
particular species, but because it was the natural wood of the place
where the god was worshipped.”[87] It is true that the Chaldaeans
regarded the cedar as the special tree of the god Ea, but the
association was probably borrowed, like the god himself, from the
non-Semitic Accadians, while the connection of the Nabataean god,
Dusares, with the vine may be traced to Hellenic influence.

Outside the Semitic area individual gods are often found, as in Greece,
linked with particular kinds of trees. In Persia the cypress was the
sacred tree of the god Mithra, while in Egypt the acacia was intimately
associated with Osiris. On an ancient sarcophagus an acacia is
represented with the device, “Osiris shoots up.”[88] And in mortuary
pictures the god is sometimes represented as a mummy covered with a tree
or with growing plants. In both cases the idea of life arising out of
death is probably implied.

[Illustration: Fig. 19.—The Bodhi-tree of Kanaka Muni (Ficus
glomerata).(The Stûpa of Bharhut, by Major-General Cunningham, Plate
xxiv. 4.)]

In India each Buddha was associated with his own bodhi-tree or tree of
wisdom. The trumpet-flower, the sâl-tree, the acacia, the pippala, and
the banian all belonged to different Buddhas, and are so depicted on the
Stûpa of Bharhut. Here in the case of the earliest of the Buddhas whose
bodhi-tree has been found, the Buddha Vipasin, the particular tree
represented is the _pâtali_ or trumpet-flower. In front of it is placed
“a throne or bodhi-manda, before which two people are kneeling, whilst a
crowd of others with joined hands are standing on each side of the
tree.”[89] The Buddha Gautama’s tree was the pippala or _Ficus
religiosa_, which is much more elaborately treated at Bharhut than any
other bodhi-tree. In the sculpture representing its adoration, “the
trunk is entirely surrounded by an open pillared building with an upper
story, ornamented with niches containing umbrellas. Two umbrellas are
placed in the top of the tree, and numerous streamers are hanging from
the branches. In the two upper corners are flying figures with wings,
bringing offerings of garlands. On each side there is a male figure
raising a garland in his right hand and holding the tip of his tongue
with the thumb and forefinger of his left. In the lower story of the
building is a throne in front of a tree. Two figures, male and female,
are kneeling before the throne, while a female figure is standing to the
left, and a Nâga Raja with his hands crossed on his breast to the right.
This figure is distinguished by a triple serpent crest. To the extreme
right there is an isolated pillar surmounted by an elephant holding out
a garland in his trunk. On the domed roof of the building is inscribed,
‘The Bodhi-Tree of the Buddha Sâkya Muni.’”[90] In another sculpture
elephants old and young are paying their devotions to a banian-tree,
while others are bringing garlands to hang on its branches. The
important bearing of these sculptures on the history of tree-worship is
obvious.

[Illustration: Fig. 20.—Wild elephants paying their devotions to the
sacred banian of Kâsyapa Buddha.(The Stûpa of Bharhut, Plate xv.)]

It may be noted in passing that neither in the many sculptured scenes at
Bharhut and Buddha Gaya, all of which are contemporary with Asoka
(_circa_ 250 B.C.), nor even in the much later sculptures of Sanchi
dating from the end of the first century A.D. is there any
representation of Buddha, the sole objects of reverence being stûpas
(representations of the tombs of holy men), wheels, or trees. At a later
date the tree appears to have lost its organic connection with the
venerated personage, and to have preserved only a ceremonial and
symbolic significance, for the Bo-tree, under which truth gradually
unfolded itself to the meditating Gautama, is regarded as sacred by
Buddhists in much the same way as the cross is by Christians.

There can be no doubt, however, that in the earliest forms of worship
current in India, the alliance between the plant world and the divine
essence was extremely intimate. The great creative god Brahma, who, by
the light of his countenance, dispelled the primeval gloom, and by his
divine influence evoked the earth from the primeval ocean, is
represented in Hindu theology as having emanated from a golden lotus
which had been quickened into life when the spirit of Om moved over the
face of the waters. Again, in Brahminical worship the very essence of
the deity is supposed to descend into his tree. The tulasi or holy basil
of India is believed by the Hindus to be pervaded by the divinity of
Vishnu and of his wife Lakshmi, and hence is venerated as a god. It
opens the gates of heaven to the pious worshipper, and those who uproot
it will be punished by Vishnu in time and eternity.[91]

In fact, in the twilight of religion, wherever we turn, the same idea of
a tree-inhabiting god prevails. In the mythology of Northern Europe the
grove of Upsala, the most sacred spot in all the Scandinavian peninsula,
was the home of Woden, the god who, after hanging for nine nights on the
gallows-tree, descended to the underworld and brought back the prize of
wisdom in the form of nine rune songs.[92] In the Middle Ages, according
to the rule by which the gods of one age become the demons of the next,
Woden was converted into Satan, his grove became the Brocken, and the
Valkyrie degenerated into witches. Taara, the supreme god of the Finns
and Esthonians, was associated with the oak, and the same is true of the
Norse god, Balder, at whose death, we are told, men, animals, and plants
wept. The principal god of the ancient Prussians was supposed to dwell
by preference in the great oak at Romove,[93] before which a hierarchy
of priests kept up a continual fire of oak-logs. The oak was veiled from
view, like the pictures in a modern continental church, and only shown
from time to time to its worshippers. The grove where it stood was so
sacred that only the consecrated were allowed to enter, and no branch in
it might be injured.[94]

[Illustration: Fig. 21.—Sacred sycamore, with offerings.(Maspero, op.
cit.)]

If proof were needed of the reverence with which the tree was regarded
in ancient times and of its hold upon the reverence of the people, as
being the dwelling-place of the god, it could be found alone in the
number of the gifts, which, by the evidence of ancient literature and
art, it was the practice to hang upon its branches or place about its
trunk. In Arabia there was a tree, identified by Robertson Smith with
the sacred acacia of Nakhla, the dwelling-place of the goddess Al-’Ozza,
on which the people of Mecca at an annual pilgrimage hung weapons,
garments, ostrich eggs, and other offerings.[95] It is spoken of in the
traditions of Mahomet by the vague name of a _dhât anwât_, or “tree to
hang things on.” Another Arabian tree, the sacred date-palm at Nejrân,
was also adored at an annual feast, and hung with fine clothes and
women’s ornaments.[96] In Egypt, offerings of figs, grapes, cucumbers,
etc. were habitually made to the deities inhabiting the sycamores.

[Illustration: Fig. 22.—Sacred tree of Artemis, hung with weapons of the
chase.(Bötticher, Fig. 9.)]

A similar custom was well known in Greece, as is proved by the many
vases and sculptured tablets in which the tree is shown hung with
consecrated fillets and offerings, while the altar beneath groans with
gifts. Statius, writing in the second century B.C., describes a widely
celebrated tree, amongst many others similarly laden, as being covered
with bows and arrows, heads of boars, skins of lions, and huge horns,
which had been dedicated to it as trophies of the chase.[97] Conquerors,
returning from battle, would hang their weapons on the sacred tree with
a dedication to the all-powerful Zeus. The arms thus dedicated were
respected even by the enemy.

This custom of making offerings to the tree is no doubt of great
antiquity. In the legend of the Golden Fleece, Phryxus, having been
carried by the fabled ram across the Hellespont, sacrificed it to Ares,
and hung its priceless fleece on the boughs of a sacred beech-tree,[98]
whence it was subsequently recovered by Jason. Such dedication at the
shrines of the gods of something that had been of service and still had
value to the worshipper, was very common in Greek and Roman worship, and
in many cases the tree was the recipient of the gift.[99] The rich
brought their jewels, the poor their homely tools and utensils. The
fisherman dedicated his nets in gratitude for an exceptional catch. The
shepherd offered his flute as a welcome gift to Pan. Some of the
dedicatory inscriptions preserve for us the pathos of the gift.
“Daphnis, the flute-player, bowed with shaking age, has here dedicated
his shepherd’s staff, too heavy for his weak hand, to meadow-loving
Pan.”[100] Lais, grown old, hangs her too truthful mirror on the sacred
tree of Aphrodite. “Take it, O lovely Cytherea; to thee alone is undying
beauty given.”[101] In the same way Bacchic revellers, their frenzy
past, brought to the tree the cymbals, robes, and perfumed tresses they
had used.[102]

There is further evidence of the sanctity of the tree in the important
function given to branches and wreaths in religious ceremonies, a custom
which can find logical explanation only in a precedent tree-worship
deeply rooted in the popular mind. In the service of the gods of Greece
and Rome the wreath was indispensable. An uncrowned worshipper was in
the position of the man in the parable who had no wedding garment. And
the wreath must have been taken from the particular tree of the god
worshipped, so that the worshipper might be placed in closest communion
with the deity, and remain inviolate from molestation while thus clothed
with the divine protection.[103]

The carrying of the sacred branch in solemn procession formed the
essential feature in some of the most important religious festivals of
Greece. At the Daphnephoria, held every nine years at Thebes in Boeotia
in honour of Apollo, the chief post in the procession was held by the
Daphnephorus, or laurel-bearer, a boy chosen for his strength and
beauty. He was followed to the temple of the god by a chorus of maidens,
also bearing branches and chanting a processional hymn, and was regarded
for the occasion as the priest of Apollo, who himself bore amongst his
many other appellations that of Daphnephorus, because he had brought the
laurel to Delphi and planted it there.[104]

At the Pyanepsia and the Thargelia, two important Athenian festivals,
the _Eiresione_, a harvest wreath of olive or laurel bound round with
red and white wool, and hung with the choicest first-fruits, was borne
about by singing boys, while offerings were made to the gods.[105] A
vine branch with the grapes upon it gave its name to another Athenian
festival, the Oschophoria, or grape carrying, held in honour of
Dionysus. A race between chosen youths formed one of the events of the
festival, the competitors running from the temple of Dionysus to that of
Athena, with boughs in their hands.[106]

Apart, however, from these important festivals, the use of wreaths or
branches was a familiar incident in the daily life of the Greeks,
bearing with it always a sort of religious significance. The bringer of
good news was rewarded with a wreath; the guests at a feast were crowned
with flowers. No gift to the gods was complete without its floral
accompaniment, and their statues were often hidden under the wreaths
brought thither as the most acceptable offering.

It can scarcely be doubted that this lavish employment of blossom and
leaf as the expression of a religious emotion originally sprang from
reverence for the tree as the favourite home of a god. The Greeks, with
their instinctive love for all things beautiful, naturally pushed this
graceful custom further than other races. But the ceremonial use of
branches and flowers was common throughout the East. The Chaldaean
sacred texts mention the use of “green branches” in religious
ceremonies.[107] At the Feast of Tabernacles the Israelites were
enjoined to “take the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm-trees,
and the boughs of thick trees and willows of the brook, and rejoice
before the Lord.”[108] The Apocrypha mentions the “festal olive boughs
of the Temple.”[109] In Persia and Armenia it was customary to bear a
branch when approaching the god. In Egypt Isis was worshipped with
sprays of absinthe, palm-branches were carried in funeral processions,
and lotus wreaths usually worn at feasts, whilst in the Assyrian
sculptures illustrious persons are frequently represented holding a
flower.[110]

However little benefit the votaries of trees and images derived from
their observances, apart from the subjective strength and solace that
flow from every act of worship, there was at least one tangible service
their gods could render them—the right of sanctuary and asylum. For the
sacred tree, sharing as it did in the protective power of the indwelling
deity, offered an inviolable refuge to the persecuted and the god’s
forgiveness to the sinner who implored it. To have touched it was
regarded amongst the Greeks as equivalent to having touched an altar or
statue of the god. A branch of it, entwined with the consecrated fillet,
assured its bearer from persecution. Hence a possible explanation of the
legend of the young Dionysus standing secure amongst the branches of the
sacred tree whilst the flames raged around him.

[Illustration: Fig. 23.—Sacred laurel of Apollo at Delphi, adorned with
fillets and votive tablets; beneath it the god appearing to protect
Orestes.(From a vase-painting, Bötticher, Fig. 2.)]

Frequent references occur in the Classics to tree-sanctuaries. The
Amazons, defeated by Hercules, found a safe asylum beneath the holy tree
at Ephesus, which was worshipped both as the symbol and temple of
Artemis, before her statue was set up in the tree or her temple built
around it.[111] Herodotus relates how Cleomenes, having burnt the sacred
grove of Argos, together with the five thousand conquered Argives who
had taken refuge there, was visited by the gods with madness for his act
of sacrilege.[112] Orestes, in his flight from the Furies, is
represented on a Greek vase as seeking refuge beneath Apollo’s
laurel.[113] The god appears out of the tree to succour him and scare
away his pursuers. The cypress grove on the Acropolis at Phlius in
Peloponnesus was another instance. Fugitives from justice on reaching it
became inviolable, and escaped prisoners hung upon its trees the chains
for which they had no further use,[114] just as the modern cripple,
whose limbs have been freed from the prison of his palsy, dedicates his
crutches to “our Lady of Lourdes.”




                              CHAPTER III
                      WOOD-DEMONS AND TREE-SPIRITS


In nearly all parts of the world, as at nearly all periods of history,
we find evidences of a belief in the existence of wood-spirits and
tree-spirits, which, however they may differ in outward form, are
strangely similar in their general characteristics. It cannot be
asserted of _all_ these beings that they were regarded as the actual
spirits of individual trees, connected with them as closely as a man’s
soul is with his body, but it is emphatically true of some of them. To
the class of wood-spirits as a whole belong certain at least of the
_jinni_ of Arabia, the woodland spirits of Greek and Roman mythology,
and the wild men and elves of European folk-lore, besides the
tree-inhabiting spirits of various uncivilised races. Though not always
sharply demarcated from the gods, they differ from them, as a rule, in
being regarded and spoken of generically, and in not having stated
relations with man. Their alliances are rather with trees, plants, and
animals, whose growth and prosperity are often believed to be under
their protection, and their presence is often assumed to be expressed in
natural phenomena, in the mysterious sounds of the woods, and in the
fury of the storm. To man they are frequently unfriendly, and numerous
observances, still practised in uncivilised parts, have arisen from the
belief that it was necessary to propitiate their favour.

Broadly speaking, their friendliness to man is directly proportionate to
their human semblance, and this in its turn would seem to depend on the
extent to which man has been able to conquer the dangers of the regions
where they dwell. The farther back they are traced the more animal-like
and inhuman their appearance. They preceded the gods and outlasted them,
flourishing in times when these were still animal and totemistic, and
retaining their animal characteristics long after the gods had become
anthropomorphic. To the peasant mind there was, perhaps, no very clear
distinction between the two classes, and the line between them has never
been an unpassable one, for demons may develop into gods, just as gods
may degenerate into demons. It is not claimed that all, or indeed most
demons were tree-spirits in their origin, but a large class of them at
any rate were closely associated with vegetable life and the phenomena
that foster or threaten it.

Chaldaean mythology recognised, side by side with gods emphatically
human, a class of fabulous monsters who were essentially demons and
inferior spirits. There is not much evidence to couple these monsters
with trees, but in one of the Babylonian hymns the aid of the gods is
invoked against a terrible demon who “makes all creatures hurry in
fear,” and of whom it is stated that “his hand is the storm-demon, his
eye is filled with the shadow of the forest, the sole of his foot is the
lullub-tree.”[115]

In the case of the _jinni_ of Arabia the connection with trees is more
clearly demonstrable. They were regarded as hairy monsters, more like
beasts than men, haunting dense, untrodden thickets and endowed with the
power of assuming various shapes. Such an uncouth and alarming
presentment may well have arisen from their presumed association with
places, which, as the natural lairs of dangerous animals, were perilous
to man, but “the association of certain kinds of _jinni_ with trees must
in many cases be regarded as primary, the trees themselves being
conceived as animated demoniac beings.”[116] They have apparently had a
longer career than most demons of the class, for their existence is
still firmly believed in by certain Bedouins, who asseverate that they
have actually seen them. Mr. Theodore Bent found the same superstitious
dread of the _jinni_ both in the Hadramaut and in Dhofar. They are
described as semi-divine spirits, who live by rocks near the streams,
under trees, or in the lakes. Mr. Bent could not induce the Bedouins of
his escort to gather a certain water-plant for fear of offending the
_jinn_ of the lake. In fact in the Gara Mountains the fear of the
_jinni_, and the skill of certain magicians in keeping them friendly,
appear to constitute the only tangible forms of religion.[117]

Under the word sĕīrīm, hairy monsters, E.V. “satyrs” and “devils,” the
Bible makes occasional mention of mythical creatures who were presumably
related to the Arabian _jinni_.[118] They are represented as frequenting
waste-places, forsaken by man and given over to nettles and brambles. In
one passage the word is used of the heathen gods of Canaan,[119] whose
close association with trees has already been noticed.

The fantastic monsters of the Egyptian desert, thought to appear only at
the moment when the minor functions assigned to them had to be
performed, and at other times to conceal themselves in inanimate
objects, are represented as sometimes dwelling in trees or in stakes
planted in the ground.[120] Their assumed complete incorporation in such
objects is proved by the expressive term used by the Egyptians—the
objects “ate them up.” Their existence and their unfriendliness to man
were firmly believed in. The shepherd feared them for his flock, the
hunter for himself. Similar beasts roamed through the Egyptian Hades and
threatened the wayfaring spirits of the dead.

These fragmentary evidences are important as casting a side-light on the
parallel superstitions of the Aryan races, amongst which, as we shall
see, the belief in wood-demons and tree-spirits was almost universal.

In Greek and Roman mythology there is a whole gallery of wild creatures
inhabiting the mountains and woods, and more or less closely associated
with vegetable life—centaurs and cyclops, Pans and satyrs, fauns and
silvani, nymphs and dryads. Mannhardt has diligently compared these
mythical beings with the wild people and wood-spirits of European
folk-lore, and has clearly demonstrated a remarkable relationship.[121]
In their evolution they present a distinctly progressive humanisation.
The earliest of them, the centaurs and cyclops, remind us of the
fabulous monsters of Semitic legend, and their contests with, and
eventual disappearance before the higher powers seem paralleled in the
similar conflict between the gods and demons of Chaldaea. Mannhardt
adduces many arguments to prove that the centaurs first originated as
local wood and mountain spirits. Their earliest haunt was the thickly
wooded Pelion; one of them is represented as the son of the dryad
Philyra or the linden; another as the son of Melia or the ash. Their
weapons were uprooted trees. Like the European wild men of the woods
they were covered with long shaggy hair. Chiron, the most friendly of
them, was skilled in the use of simples and in the hidden powers of
nature. Lastly, their presence was assumed in the whirlwind and other
violent atmospheric phenomena. All these features class the archaic
centaurs with the undoubted wood-spirits of a later mythology. The same
is probably true of the cyclops, whose characteristics—their single eye,
their use of uprooted trees for weapons, and their connection with sheep
and goats—may be paralleled amongst the legendary wood-spirits of modern
Europe.

In later times the place of the extinct centaurs and cyclops was taken
by a tribe, half men half goats, known as Pan, satyrs, and sileni, who
originally were in all probability local wood-spirits, Pan proceeding
from Arcadia, the satyrs from Argos, the sileni from Phrygia. In the
case of Pan we seem to see a class of doubtfully amicable wood-spirits
developing into a more or less benevolent god. The Greek poets of the
Periclean age speak of a whole tribe of wood-demons known as Panes or
Panisci, from which eventually an individual, “the Great Pan,” seems to
have emerged. The son of a nymph, Pan is called in the Classics “god of
the wood,” “companion of kids,” “goatherd.” He is represented with horns
and goat’s legs, standing beside a sacred oak or pine, a fir-wreath on
his head, and a branch in his hand. He leads the revels of the satyrs,
pipes and dances amongst the wood-nymphs under the trees, and woos a
pine-tree personified as Pithys. Like other wood-spirits he protects the
herds, and, as befits a demon on the way to apotheosis, is for the most
part friendly to man. But he never, apparently, quite lost his original
character, for he is sometimes classed with incubi and spirits who cause
evil dreams.

The satyr was a degraded, or rather unhumanised Pan, more sensual and
malicious in character, coarser in feature, and more bestial in form.
Hesiod calls the satyrs “a useless and crafty tribe.” They were
originally wood-demons, and men represented as satyrs took part in the
festivals of Dionysus, the chief of vegetation spirits. Silenus, like
Pan, the individualised head of a class, was also closely associated
with Dionysus. The sileni, in fact, were but Phrygian variants of the
satyrs, and are represented in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite as
consorting with the hamadryads. In Art they appear clothed in goatskins.
It may be added that the modern Greek peasant still believes in
malicious goat-footed demons who inhabit the mountains.[122]

In Roman mythology the fauns and silvani played the same part as Pan and
the satyrs in Greece, and the same confusion existed as to whether they
were individual or generic. The fauns seldom appeared to mortal sight,
but their presence was made known in the weird noises and the ghostly
appearances of the dark forest. When seen they had horns and goat’s
feet, though in a later rendering they are more human in appearance.
They guarded the flocks pasturing in the woods and, like other
wood-spirits, also protected the cornfield. Silvanus and the silvani, as
their name denotes, were tree-spirits even more emphatically than the
fauns. According to Virgil the oldest inhabitants of Latium allotted to
Silvanus a sacred grove and a special festival;[123] in later times he
was universally regarded as the patron of the garden and field. At
harvest time an offering of milk was poured over the roots of his sacred
tree. In Art, Silvanus is represented as covered with hair (_horridus_)
and standing under, or growing out of a garlanded tree, a crown of pine
sprays on his head, a large pine bough in one hand and a sickle in the
other. An inscription speaks of him as half enclosed in a sacred ash
(_sacrâ semiclusus fraxino_). Another account associates the silvani
with the fig-tree, and states that they were called by some _fauni
ficarii_. Both fauns and silvani had an evil reputation for their
supposed propensity to assault women, to carry off children, and to
disturb the dreams of sleepers. The peasants of North Italy and Sicily
still believe in wood-spirits, _gente selvatica_, closely resembling the
old silvani. A Sicilian incantation is addressed to the spirit of the
fig-tree and the devils of the nut-trees.[124]

Taking the sum of their characteristics, Mannhardt is doubtless right in
classing these legendary beings with the wood-spirits met with in the
folk-lore of Northern Europe.

It is, however, in the female counterparts of these woodland creatures
that the idea of an actual tree-soul is most clearly exemplified. The
most striking instance is the familiar one of the hamadryads, the
deep-bosomed nymphs of wooded Ida, to whose care Aphrodite entrusted the
infant Aeneas, and whose very name expresses their intimate connection
with their trees. To quote the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, which was
probably written under Phrygian influence, “They belong neither to the
mortals nor to the immortals: they live long, indeed, enjoying immortal
food, and with the immortals they join in the lordly dance. The sileni
mate with them, and Hermes, too, in the privy recesses of delightful
grottoes. With them, when they were born, upon the mountains lofty pines
and oaks sprang forth from the earth that gives food to man. Yet when at
last the fate of death overtakes them, first the beautiful trees wither
upon the earth, the bark dies around them, their branches fall away, and
therewith the souls of the nymphs leave the light of the sun.”[125]

Pindar, who would appear to have first given them the name of
hamadryads, speaks of them as having the same length of life as a
tree.[126]

But the case of the hamadryads is by no means an isolated example of the
Greek belief in spirits whose life was bound up with the life of the
tree. In the Homeric hymn to Ceres the nymphs rejoice when the oaks are
in leaf, and weep when their branches become bare.[127] Elsewhere a
nymph is depicted imploring that the oak wherein she dwelt should not be
hewn down, and as bringing vengeance on him who ignored her
entreaty.[128] It was not only the oak and the pine that might be
inhabited by a spirit. Amongst the names of nymphs that have come down
to us is Philyra (the linden), Daphne (the laurel), Rhoea (the
pomegranate), and Helike (the willow). In later times an attempt was
made in some cases to explain the connection by metamorphosis, a living
nymph being supposed to have been converted into a tree, but it is
extremely probable that this was an inversion of the primitive nexus.

There are many instances closely parallel to these classical myths in
mediaeval and modern legend. The story of Alexander and the
flower-maidens, for instance, which was a favourite with the
troubadours, and was subsequently popularised by Lamprecht, and later by
Uhland, was presumably founded on a legend current in ancient Greece.
The story goes that in a certain wood, when spring came, numbers of
enormous flower buds appeared out of the ground, from each of which, as
it opened, there leapt forth a beautiful maiden. Their robes were a part
of their growth, and in colour they were just like their flowers, red
and white. They played and danced in the shade, and their singing
rivalled the birds’. All past heartaches were wiped away, and a life of
joy and abundance seemed to open to him who saw them. But it was death
for a maiden to leave her shady retreat and encounter the scorching sun.
When summer was past, and the flowers withered and the birds were
silent, the beautiful creatures died. Alexander and his knights, coming
upon this magical wood, mated with the flower-maidens, and for more than
three months lived in perfect happiness, till one by one the flowers
faded, one by one the nymphs died, and the king and his companions had
sorrowfully to resume their travels.[129]

Legends of this sort no doubt provided Lucian with the motive for that
“true history” of his, wherein he tells of the wonderful vines growing
on the far side of a certain river that ran wine instead of water. These
vines below had a very thick stem, but above bore maidens’ bodies of
perfect form. Bunches of grapes grew from their finger-tips, and vine
leaves and grapes formed their hair. They gave the travellers a friendly
greeting, and bade them welcome, most speaking Greek, others Lydian or
Indian. Whoever accepted their kisses felt a sudden drunken
bewilderment. They shrieked aloud with pain when one attempted to pluck
their grapes. Two of the travellers who surrendered themselves to their
embraces could not get free again, but took root and budded forth vine
leaves.[130]

The above, of course, was intended as a literary parody, but stories,
not a whit less wonderful, are found in the folk-lore of many modern
countries, and are no doubt recited and received in good faith. There is
a modern Greek legend, for instance, of a childless wife, to whom
Heaven, in answer to her prayer for children, sent a golden laurel
berry. Despising the gift she threw it away. From it there grew a
laurel-tree with golden sprays. A prince, following the chase, was so
struck by its beauty that he ordered his dinner to be prepared beneath
it. In the absence of the cook the tree opened and a fair maiden stepped
forth, and after strewing a handful of salt over his food, withdrew to
the tree, which immediately reinclosed her. The following day the prince
again found his dinner spoilt, and on the third day he determined to
keep watch. The maid came forth and was captured by the prince before
she could regain her tree. After a time she escaped, and coming back to
the tree called upon it to open and receive her. But it remained closed,
and she was obliged to return to her prince, with whom, after various
mischances, she lived happily for ever after.[131]

The Czekhs have a similar story of a nymph who roamed the forest by day,
but at night invariably returned to her willow. She married a mortal and
bore him a child. One day the willow was cut down and the nymph died. A
cradle fashioned out of its wood had the power of lulling her child to
sleep, and when he grew up he was able to hold converse with his mother
by means of a pipe formed from the twigs which grew about the
stump.[132]

That the soul of the nymph was thought actually to inhabit the tree is
further proved by the belief current both in ancient and modern myth,
that blood would flow when the tree was injured. It was firmly held in
primitive times that the blood was the very life, the soul of an animal,
and hence in primitive ritual it was the blood of the sacrifice that was
offered to the god. It is interesting to note that in some cases
wine—“the blood of the grape”—and the juices of fruits and vegetables,
_i.e._ the vehicle of the plant-soul, were used as substitutes for
blood.[133] In a later chapter we shall see that herbs and flowers were
fabled to grow from the blood of the dead and so to re-embody his
spirit, and it will be remembered how Virgil makes the cornel and myrtle
which grew upon the grave of Polydorus at once bleed and speak when torn
up by the hand of Aeneas.[134] So Ovid, recounting a similar occurrence
in the case of the dryads’ oak, sacrilegiously felled by Eresicthon, was
probably only giving a poetic version of a familiar belief:—

                            He it was
  Whose impious axe mid Ceres’ sacred grove
  Dared violate her immemorial shades.
  Huge with the growth of ages in its midst
  An ancient oak there stood, itself a grove,
  With votive tablets hung and grateful gifts
  For vows accomplished. Underneath its shade
  The dryads wove their festal dance.

Eresicthon, in spite of warnings, refused to stay his hand.

  The trembling tree sent forth an audible groan!
  From its pale leaves and acorns died the green,
  Dark oozing sweat from every branch distilled,
  And as the scoffer smote it, crimson-red
  Gushed from the wounded bark the sap, as streams
  When at the altar falls some mighty bull
  The life-blood from his neck.

                    Then from its heart
  Issued a voice, “Thou strikest in this trunk
  A nymph whom Ceres loves, and for the deed
  Dearly shalt pay. With my last voice thy doom
  I prophesy, and in thy imminent fate
  Find solace for my own.”[135]

Mannhardt quotes several mediaeval and modern instances of the belief in
bleeding trees.[136] And stories of punishment incurred for destroying a
spirit-inhabited tree are not uncommon in folk-lore. There is a German
legend of an old crone who attempted to uproot the trunk of an ancient
fir-tree. In the midst of her labours a sudden weakness fell upon her,
insomuch that she was scarcely able to walk. While endeavouring to crawl
home she met a mysterious stranger, who, hearing her story, at once
pronounced that in her attempts to uproot the tree she had wounded an
elf inhabiting it. If the elf recovered, he said, so would she; if not,
she would die. As the old woman perished that self-same night we are
left to infer that the elf died also. From India comes a similar
recital. While felling a tree the youthful Satyavant broke out into a
profuse sweat, and overcome with sudden weakness, fainted and died upon
the spot: he had mortally wounded the indwelling spirit.

Such stories have no doubt arisen from the dread inspired by
wood-spirits amongst all people who believe in them. In short, the wild
inhabitants of the woods have always retained some of the awe with which
their forerunners, the demons, were regarded. Often they are credited
with quite a wanton vindictiveness. A Bengal folk-tale tells of a
certain banian-tree haunted by spirits who had a habit of wringing the
necks of all who ventured to approach the tree by night.[137] In another
Indian story a tree that grew beside a Brahman’s house was inhabited by
a _sankchinni_, a female spirit of white complexion, who one day seized
the Brahman’s wife and thrust her into a hole in the tree.[138]
Sometimes the tree-spirit will be wicked and foolish enough to enter
into a human being, and then the exorcist’s services are called in. The
presence of the spirit is easily discovered. The exorcist has only to
set fire to a piece of turmeric root, it being of common knowledge that
no spirit can endure the smell of burning turmeric.

The Shánárs of India believe that disembodied spirits haunt the earth,
dwelling in trees and taking especial delight in dark forests and
solitary places.[139] When a Burman starts upon a journey he hangs a
branch of plantains or a spray of the sacred _Eugenia_ on the pole of
his buffalo cart, to conciliate any spirit upon whom he may be
unfortunate enough to intrude. The hunter following his lonely quest in
the forest will deposit some rice and a little bundle of leaves at the
foot of any more than usually majestic tree, hoping thereby to
propitiate the _nat_ or spirit dwelling therein.[140]

Something of the same fear is felt by the peasants for the fairies,
elves, pixies, and all the tribe of little people familiar to European
folk-lore. These, too, are all more or less associated with trees, being
supposed to dwell either amongst the branches or in the hollow trunks.
German elves have a partiality for the oak and elder, and the holes in
the trunks are the doorways by which they pass in and out. A similar
idea exists amongst the Hindus. Though, as a rule, these forest-elves
bear a good character, they are not to be lightly offended, or more will
be heard of it. Hence prudent country-folk will never injure trees
inhabited by fairies, for when aggrieved they have ample means of
avenging themselves by inflicting some malady or causing some ill-luck.

Even in England, especially in Devon and Cornwall, there still exist
people who believe that oaks are inhabited by elves—

  Fairy elves, whose midnight revels
  By a forest side or fountain
  Some belated peasant sees.

And it is not yet quite an obsolete custom to turn the coat for luck
when passing through elf-haunted groves. It was on St. John’s eve that
the fairies held their special revels, and in old days many a timorous
hand might be found attaching to his doorway branches of St. John’s
wort, gathered at midnight on St. John’s eve, to protect his dwelling
from an invasion of elves. Similarly the peasants living near Mount Etna
never sleep beneath trees on St. John’s eve, lest the spirits who then
issue freely from their leafy dwelling-places should enter into the
sleeper.[141]

But it is in Central and North Europe, in the Tyrol and the Vosges, in
the German forests, in Russia, Scandinavia, and Finland, that the belief
in wood-spirits is most deeply rooted and persistent. Mannhardt, who has
diligently collected an enormous mass of evidence on the subject, states
that traditions concerning the wild people of the woods are current in
all the more wooded countries of Europe. He sees in these traditions an
amalgamation of the idea of tree-spirits with that of wind-spirits, and
rejects the hypothesis that they arose out of remembrances of savage
half-bestial aborigines who took to the woods on the advance of more
civilised races.[142] He thus summarises the character of the wild
people of Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia. They are often of gigantic
proportions, dwell in woods or mountains, and originally were no doubt
closely connected with the spirits of trees, their knowledge of
“simples” and remedies for sick cattle connecting them with the spirits
of vegetation. From head to foot they are clothed in moss, or covered
with rough shaggy hair, their long locks floating behind them in the
wind. Occasionally they assume an animal form. They announce their
presence in the wind and tempest. The male spirits carry as weapons
uprooted pines or other trees, and in their fights with each other use
tree trunks and pieces of rock. They are almost invariably of a wanton
disposition.[143]

Of all the various spirits of the woods, the moss-woman of Central
Germany appears to be the most definite example of a tree-spirit. As
with the Greek dryad, her life is bound up with that of a tree.[144] The
moss-women bear different names and somewhat different characters in
different localities, but the following description by the author of
_The Fairy Family_ represents the common tradition:—

  “A moss-woman,” the haymakers cry
  And over the fields in terror they fly,
  She is loosely clad from neck to foot
  In a mantle of moss from the maple’s root,
  And like lichen gray on its stem that grows
  Is the hair that over her mantle flows.
  Her skin like the maple-rind is hard,
  Brown and ridgy and furrowed and scarred;
  And each feature flat like the bark we see,
  When a bough has been lopped from the bole of a tree,
  When the newer bark has crept healingly round
  And laps o’er the edge of the open wound;
  Her knotty, root-like feet are bare,
  And her height is an ell from heel to hair.

Sometimes, however, the moss-women and their relatives the wood-maidens
are more friendly to man, and will help him industriously in the
harvest-field; they have even been known to enter his service and bring
prosperity to all his undertakings.

The wild women of Tyrol, known locally as Wild-fanggen, are much more
terrifying individuals. Gigantic in stature, their whole body is covered
with hair and bristles, and their face distorted with a mouth that
stretches from ear to ear. They live together in the woods, with which
their lives are bound up. If their special wood is destroyed they
disappear; if the tree from which a fangga takes her name dies or is
felled, she passes out of existence.[145]

The peasants in the Swiss Canton of the Grisons, which by the way has a
“wild-man” for its heraldic device, believe in wood-spirits of great
strength and agility, who are skilled in weather-lore and the recovery
of strayed cattle.[146] The female spirits, some of whom have been known
to marry mortals, are clothed in skins; but the males, who are hairy,
content themselves with a crown of oak leaves. They are sometimes
helpful to men, but more often mischievous, having a propensity for
stealing the milk and carrying off the children of the peasants.

The white and green ladies of Franche Comté and Neufchatel belong to the
same family, their special proclivity being to entice men away, to drag
them through brake and brier, and leave them stripped of their
possessions.[147] In Neufchatel there is a rock, “La roche de la Dame
Verte,” which young men are especially warned to avoid; and in the Jura,
a wood where beneath an oak the green ladies are wont to light a fire,
and may be heard singing and dancing around it. The peasants when they
see the wild flowers and the young corn waving in the wind, whisper to
each other that the green lady is passing over them with her companions.

The Swedish conception of the tree-spirit is very similar. He also
delights to lead astray those who intrude upon his forest domain. The
well-known tendency of man, after losing himself, to wander round and
round until he regains his starting-place, is attributed to the
wood-spirit. He looks like a man when you meet him, but touch him and he
shoots to the height of the loftiest tree. You cry out in terror, and he
laughs “Ha, ha!” Hunters seek the friendship of these lords of the
forest, for he who stands well with them never misses his aim.[148]

The wood-demon of the Russians, Ljeschi, calls to mind both classical
and modern traditions. He is of human form, with the horns, ears, and
feet of a goat, his fingers are long claws, and he is covered with rough
hair, often of a green colour. He can assume many forms, and vary his
stature at will; in the fields he is no higher than the grass, in the
woods as tall as the trees. Sometimes he is like a man, clothed in
sheepskins, and often, like the cyclops, with only one eye. Like other
wood-demons, he announces his presence in the storm and the wind. He
springs from tree to tree, and rocks himself in the branches, screeching
and laughing, neighing, lowing, and barking. He delights to mislead the
traveller and plunge him in difficulties. However unfriendly to man,
Ljeschi is on good terms with animals; all the birds and beasts of the
wood are under his protection, and the migrations of squirrels,
field-mice, and such small deer are carried out under his guidance. The
peasants are at pains to propitiate him. In the province of Olonitz the
shepherds offer him a cow every summer, to secure his favour for the
herd; elsewhere the hunter gives him the first thing he shoots, leaving
it for him in an oak-wood, or places a piece of bread or pancake strewed
with salt upon a tree stump. There are certain ways of conjuring his
presence and his aid by means of birch-twigs, or by uttering a given
formula while standing on a tree-stump, from which it would appear that
he is thought of as dwelling in these vegetable fragments.[149] The
Russians also believe in female wood-spirits of terrifying appearance,
but they are of less importance than the male.

In the folk-lore of the Finns the spirits of the woods bear a more
benign character. The chief of them, “Tapio,” is termed “the gracious
god of the woodlands,” and is represented as very tall and slender, with
a long brown beard, a coat of tree moss, and a high-crowned hat of fir
leaves. His consort is Mielikki, “the honey rich mother of the
woodland,” “the hostess of glen and forest.” The neighbouring Esthonians
have their “grass-mother” who, besides presiding over the home-field, is
also queen of the woods.

It is not perhaps singular to find that the traditions with regard to
wood-spirits current amongst contiguous peoples should exhibit such a
strong resemblance to each other, but when almost exactly the same
conceptions are met with in such distant parts as Japan and South
America, we can only conclude that the human mind, wherever it exists,
is similarly constituted, and, granted the same phenomena, falls back
upon the same ideas to explain them.

The Tengus of Japanese legend have many of the characteristic marks of
the wood-spirit. They dwell in the topmost branches of lofty trees, are
skilled in the language and lore of animals and plants, and are a terror
to untruthful children. They have the body of a man, the head of a hawk,
with a long proboscis, and powerful claws on their hands; on their feet,
also provided with claws, are stilt-like clogs a foot high. They are
hatched from eggs, and in their youth have feathers and wings.[150]

A traveller in Peru only sixty years ago found the tradition of a living
wood-ghost, who dwelt in the darkest part of the forest, the haunt of
night-birds, and issued forth to decoy the Indians to their
destruction.[151] The idea of a wild man of the woods also exists in
Brazil. The Indians call him Curupira, and attribute to his agency all
such forest sounds as they cannot understand.[152]

Some of the foregoing traditions present a glimpse of the transition
towards a later and more highly developed conception, in which the many
spirits once believed in become generalised into a single “spirit of
vegetation.” It is not indeed contended that this belief is necessarily
destructive of the earlier. Indeed it is possible that in the loosely
working mind of the peasant the two conceptions may exist side by side.
The many interesting ceremonies and observances which arose out of this
generalised conception will be dealt with in a later chapter.




                               CHAPTER IV
                 THE TREE IN ITS RELATION TO HUMAN LIFE


Having dealt with the Tree in its connection on the one hand with gods,
and on the other with spirits of more equivocal attributes, we have now
to consider a series of myths and traditions wherein it was regarded as
entering into a still more intimate relationship with man. Sometimes it
was represented as the source from which the human race originally
sprang, sometimes, conversely, as the object into which the soul might
retreat after death, or into which an individual might be transmuted,
body and soul, by some miraculous agency. In other cases the life of a
particular tree was held to be bound up with that of an individual or a
community, and lastly, in a still larger conception, the tree came to be
very widely regarded as the embodiment of the spirit of fertility, the
especial patron of the field and flock.

To the modern mind, which claims to have deciphered Nature’s scattered
hieroglyphs, and finds a genealogical document even in the evanescent
wrinkles on a baby’s foot, the idea of man taking origin from a tree
will seem in the highest degree fantastic, but to the primitive
intelligence it probably presented no greater difficulty than the
extraction of the new baby from the parsley bed does to the modern
child. The early inquirer may well have found in it the most natural
answer to the eternal riddle, “Whence came our first parents?” the most
plausible solution to the strange problem of man’s separate existence
upon the globe, supplying the necessary link between him and the great
mother-earth, which supported and fed him while alive, and received him
again into her bosom when dead. Speculation apart, however, the solution
would appear to have commended itself to many different inquirers, for
the belief that the human race took its first origin from trees is met
with in the mythology of the most widely separated races.

Thus we read in the Eddas that when heaven and earth had been made, Odin
and his brothers walking by the sea-shore came upon two trees. These
they changed into human beings, male and female. The first brother gave
them soul and life; the second endowed them with wit and will to move;
the third added face, speech, sight, and hearing. They clothed them also
and chose their names, Ask for the man’s and Embla for the woman’s. And
then they sent them forth to be the parents of the human race.[153]

Again, according to the Iranian account of the creation the first human
couple, Maschia and Maschiâna, issued from the ground in the form of a
rhubarb plant (the _Rheum ribes_), which was at first single, but in
process of time became divided into two.[154] Ormuzd imparted to each a
human soul, and they became the parents of mankind.

In the corresponding legend current amongst the Sioux of the Upper
Missouri[155] one seems to catch an echo from the Garden of Eden. Here
the original parents, like the trees from which they developed, at first
stood firmly fixed to the earth, until a monster snake gnawed away the
roots and gave them independent motion, just as in Paradise the serpent
destroyed the harmony and mutual trust which united Adam and Eve.

The classical nations possessed a similar tradition. According to
Hesychius it was believed by the Greeks that the human race was the
fruit of the ash, and Hesiod relates that it was from the trunks of
ash-trees that Zeus created the third or bronze race of men.[156] The
oak was particularised as the favoured tree in another tradition.
“Whence art thou?” inquires Penelope of the disguised Ulysses, “for thou
are not sprung of oak or rock, as old tales tell.”[157] Virgil, too,
speaks of

  Nymphs, and fauns, and savage men, who took
  Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak.[158]

The Damaras of South Africa believe that the universal progenitor was a
tree, out of which came Damaras, Bushmen, oxen and zebras, and
everything else that lives.[159]

In other legends human beings are represented as arising from the tree
as its fruit. The first book of the _Mahâbhârata_ tells of an enormous
Indian fig-tree from whose branches hung little devotees in human form;
and an Italian traveller of the fourteenth century was assured by the
natives of Malabar that they knew of trees, which instead of fruit bore
pigmy men and women. So long as the wind blew they remained fresh and
healthy, but when it dropped they became withered and dry.[160] A
somewhat similar tradition was familiar to the Arab geographers, who
tell of a talking tree growing at the easternmost point of the habitable
world, which bore young women on its branches in place of fruit.[161]
And even to the present day folk-tales of Saxony and Thuringia speak of
children as “growing on the tree.”

In another class of origin-myths _individual_ births are represented as
taking place directly from a tree. Adonis came forth at the stroke of a
sword from the tree into which his mother, the guilty Myrrha, had been
transformed in answer to her prayers.[162] The Phrygian Attis, according
to one version, was fathered by an almond-tree; while, according to
another, his body was confined by Cybele in a pine-tree, from which on
the return of spring he was born again.[163] The Khatties of Central
India claim to be descended from a certain Khat, “begotten of wood,”
who, at the prayer of Karna, an illegitimate brother of the five sons of
Pându (heroes of the _Mahâbhârata_), sprang from the staff he had
fashioned from the branch of a tree to assist him against his legitimate
kinsmen.[164]

The above examples prove how widely the conception prevailed that human
beings or man-like spirits might owe their first origin to the tree. In
a later stage these crude myths were rationalised in three directions.
In one the tree came to be, not the source, but the scene of a
miraculous birth; in another its supposed connection with a human being
was explained by a metamorphosis legend; and, thirdly, the tree came to
be regarded as the symbol and minister of fecundity.

Many of the gods of Greece were born or brought up, according to
tradition, at the foot of some tree, whence Bötticher argues that their
worship was founded on a pre-existing tree-cult. Rhea gave birth to Zeus
beneath a poplar in Crete, and the ruins of her temple in an adjoining
cypress grove were shown even up to the Augustan age.[165] The people of
Tanagra asserted that the young Hermes was reared amongst them under a
purslane-tree (_andrachnos_), the remains of which were for long
treasured in the temple of the god as a sacred souvenir of the
institution of his worship.[166] Hera was born and brought up under a
willow in Samos, described by Pausanias, who saw it still in leaf, as
the most ancient of the sacred trees known to the Greeks.[167] Leto gave
birth to Apollo and Artemis in the island of Delos while clasping two
trees, by some authorities particularised as an olive and a palm, by
others, under the idea that Apollo must have been born at the foot of
his own tree, as two laurels.[168] Romulus and Remus were found under
the _Ficus ruminalis_ by the Tiber, and in later days were worshipped in
the Comitium beneath a sapling from that tree. The same idea is met with
in the mythology of other nations. Vishnu was born beneath the pillared
shade of the banian; Buddha was born and died under a sâl-tree.

The converse of these origin myths is represented in the numerous
legends of metamorphosis and transmigration. The well-known story of
Apollo and Daphne seems to supply an instance of the way in which the
metamorphosis story arose to explain a more primitive connection, the
meaning of which had been lost. It is an established fact that the
laurel was held sacred in Greece as connected with earth-oracles before
the worship of Apollo was introduced. A sacred laurel grew by the
prophetic cleft at Delphi in the days when the earth-goddess, Gaia,
still presided over the oracle, and according to tradition the goddess’
daughter, Daphne, a mountain nymph, was priestess under her.[169] The
story which explains the transference of the oracular power from Gaia to
Apollo tells how Daphne, fleeing before the god, entreats her mother,
Earth, to save her; the ground opens to receive her, and in her place a
laurel appears. Apollo, balked of his love, cries: “If thou may’st not
be my wife, thou shalt for ever be my tree,” and henceforward he makes
the laurel his sanctuary, and crowns his head and his lyre with its
leaves. Thus he steps into her mother’s place, and the laws of Zeus—the
old earth-oracles under a new name—are proclaimed through him.

The story is one of the many folk-tales concerning the conversion of
mortals into trees which Ovid has so gracefully elaborated in his
_Metamorphoses_, and which assume a new importance now that we can trace
them back into that old world when tree and man, and indeed all living
things, were held to be so near akin. How far they owed their origin to
the desire to find a new sanction for the traditional tree-worship by
investing it with a human interest, it is impossible to say. It is
sufficient for us that they demonstrate the survival of very ancient
modes of thought amongst races who had otherwise reached a high degree
of civilisation. They were amongst the miracles of classical antiquity,
and like other miracles, if they prove nothing else, they at least
afford invaluable evidence as to the state of mental culture amongst
those who found them credible.

One of the most interesting of these metamorphosis legends concerns the
fate of the three daughters of the Sun and Clymene, who were so
heart-broken at the tragic fate of their brother Phaëton that they were
changed into poplars by the banks of the stream into which he had been
hurled,—the Eridanus or Po. The tears they shed were preserved in the
form of amber:—

                        As she bent
  To kneel, Phaëthusa, eldest born, her feet
  Felt stiffen, and Lampetië, at her cry
  Starting, took sudden root, and strove in vain
  For motion to her aid. The third, her hair
  In anguish tearing, tore off leaves! And now
  Their legs grow fixed as trunks, their arms as boughs
  Extend, and upward round them creeps a bark
  That gradual folds the form entire, save yet
  The head and mouth, that to their mother shrieks
  For help. What help is hers to give? Now here,
  Now there she rushes, frantic, kissing this
  Or that while yet she can, and strives to rend
  Their bodies from the clasping bark, and tears
  The fresh leaves from their sprouting heads, and sees,
  Aghast, red drops as from some wound distil.
  And “Ah, forbear!” the sufferer shrieks; “forbear,
  O mother dear! our bodies in these trees
  Alone are rent! Farewell!” And o’er the words,
  Scarce-uttered, closed the bark, and all was still.
        But yet they weep; and in the sun their tears
  To amber harden, by the clear stream caught
  And borne, the gaud and grace of Latian maids.[170]

The story of Baucis and Philemon—the worthy peasants who so hospitably
entertained the gods, Zeus and Hermes, disguised as travellers, that
their cottage was changed into a temple and they themselves into its
priest and priestess—is more familiar. Their prayer that neither should
witness the death of the other was fulfilled by the gods, by means of a
device familiar enough to the folk-lore of the time:—

      As one morn upon the hallowed steps,
  Bowed now with years, they stood, and to a knot
  Of wondering hearers told the Temple’s tale,
  Surprised each saw the other’s figure change
  And sprout with sudden verdure: and, as round
  Their forms the rapid foliage spread, while yet
  They could, one mutual fond “Farewell” they took,
  One kiss, and o’er their faces closed the bark,
  And both in trees were hidden! Still the boughs
  That interlacing link the neighbour trunks
  Tyana’s peasant loves to show:—the tale
  Her gravest elders—men not like to lie,
  As wherefore should they lie?—with serious faith
  Attested to these ears. The honoured boughs
  Myself have seen with garlands decked, myself
  One garland added more.[171]

In many cases metamorphosis legends were attached to particular kinds of
trees, thereby no doubt reinforcing the reverence and affection with
which they were regarded. The Greek name for the almond tree, “Phylla,”
recalled the fate of Phyllis, the beautiful Thracian, who hanged herself
in despair when she thought Demophoon had deserted her, and was changed
by the gods into one of these trees. Shortly afterwards the truant lover
returned, heard the sorrowful tidings, visited the tree, and embraced it
with tears. Then suddenly its branches, which till then had remained
bare, burst forth into blossom and verdure, as if to show how joyfully
conscious they were of the beloved’s return. Melus, priest of Aphrodite,
filled with grief at the death of his foster-son Adonis, hanged himself,
and was changed by the goddess he served into an apple-tree, from which
time forward the apple came to be regarded as the most acceptable gift
that a lover could offer at her shrine. Lotis, a beautiful nymph,
pursued by Priapus, threw herself on the mercy of the gods, and by them
was changed into the lotus-tree.

The pine-tree, into which Cybele, in a moment of anger, had changed her
lover and devotee, Attis, owed its perennial verdure to the compassion
of Zeus for her remorse. The pomegranate was connected in tradition with
a certain maid whom Dionysus loved, and the crown-like form of its
blossom was accounted for by the story that the god, before he changed
her into a tree, had promised her that she should one day wear a crown.
The frankincense-tree owed its virtue to the nectar and ambrosia
scattered by Apollo on the tomb of Leucothea, who had secured his love,
and in consequence had been buried alive at the instance of her rival,
Clytia. The tree grew from her grave, and Clytia, pining away in turn
from grief, was changed into a plant whose blossoms were destined
henceforth, like our sunflower, perpetually to confront the sun, her
faithless lover.

The vicarious immortality which the jealous but faithful Clytia thus
secured was shared by other fabled personages, many of whom, according
to that poetical sentiment which is begotten of all that is gentle and
beautiful in nature, were changed into flowers. The idea is indeed a
graceful one. For a beautiful youth or maiden, dying young and unhappy,
no better recompense than such a flower-change could be imagined by a
people, full indeed of the instinctive craving for immortality, but
vague in their assurance of a life beyond the grave.

The nymphs who, hearing of the sad death of the beautiful Narcissus,
hurried to perform his obsequies, found that he had been changed into a
flower, the cup of which was filled with the tears that he had shed.
“Bid daffodillies fill their cups with tears,” sings Milton, using the
old English name for the narcissus. Rhodanthe, the universal praise of
whose beauty had aroused the jealous anger of Artemis, was changed by
Apollo into the rose. The pipe of Pan was fashioned from the reeds into
which the nymph, Syrinx, had been transformed by her sister nymphs in
their determination to rescue her from the god’s unwelcome overtures.

There are many instances in classical mythology wherein flowers were
believed to have arisen from the blood, _i.e._ the very life, of dying
persons. The violet sprang from the blood of Attis when Cybele changed
him into a pine-tree. From the blood of Hyacinthus, killed in anger by
Zephyrus, Apollo caused the hyacinth to grow. Acis, crushed to death by
Polyphemus, was changed into a stream, but from his blood there sprang
the flowering rush. According to the Egyptians the vine arose from the
blood of the Titans.

In other cases tear-drops were, so to speak, the seed of the miracle.
The anemone grew from the tears that Aphrodite shed at the death of
Adonis:—

  “Woe, woe for Cytherea, he hath perished, the lovely Adonis.
  A tear the Paphian sheds for each blood-drop of Adonis,
  And tears and blood on the earth are turned to flowers.
  The blood brings forth the rose; the tears, the wind-flower;
  Woe, woe for Cytherea, he hath perished, the lovely Adonis!”[172]

Shakespeare, it will be remembered, gives to the anemone the magical
power of producing love.[173]

The legendary lore of the East contains traditions similar to those
above mentioned, of which it will be sufficient to cite the
following:—The Burmese believe that the _Canna Indica_ or Indian shot
sprang from the sacred blood of the Buddha. His evil-minded
brother-in-law, incensed at not being allowed to hold a separate
assembly of his own, rolled down a rock upon the teacher from a lofty
hill. A fragment bruised the Buddha’s toe, and drew from it a few drops
of blood, from which the sacred plant arose.[174]

In another class of legends, more characteristic of mediaeval than of
classical mythology, the _soul_ of the dead person was believed to pass
into a tree. They are, in fact, cases rather of metempsychosis than of
metamorphosis. A legend current in Cornwall tells how, after the loss of
her lover, Iseult died broken-hearted, and was buried in the same church
with Tristram, but by the king’s decree at some distance from him. Soon
ivy sprang from either grave, and each branch grew and grew until it met
its fellow at the crown of the vaulted roof, and there clasped it and
clung to it as only ivy can.[175] In another version the plants that
sprang from the graves of the lovers were a rose and a vine. The same
idea is met with in the familiar ballad of Fair Margaret and Sweet
William.

  Margaret was buried in the lower chancèl,
    And William in the higher;
  Out of her breast there sprang a rose,
    And out of his a brier.
  They grew till they grew into the church top,
    And then they could grow no higher;
  And there they tyed in a true lover’s knot,
    Which made all the people admire.[176]

A story is told in Japan of a faithful couple who, after enjoying long
years of happiness, died at last at the same moment; their spirits
withdrew into a tall pine-tree of great age, which a god had once
planted as he passed that way. On moonlight nights the lovers may be
seen raking together the pine-needles under the tree, which to this day
is known as the Pine of the Lovers.[177]

A certain Chinese king had a secretary, Hanpang, for whose young and
beautiful wife he conceived a violent passion. Failing in his designs
upon her, the king threw Hanpang into prison, where he shortly died of
grief. His wife, to escape the royal suit, threw herself from a lofty
terrace, having entreated as a last favour that she might be buried
beside her husband. The king in his anger ordered otherwise. But that
same night a cedar sprang from each grave, and in ten days they had
become so tall and vigorous in their growth that they were able to
interlace both branch and root, and the people called them the Trees of
Faithful Love.[178]

In Germany the following story is told to explain why a certain blue
flower, the endive, which grows by the roadside, is called the
“Wegewarte” or way-watcher. A maiden, eagerly anticipating the return of
her lover from a long voyage, visited every morning and evening the spot
where they had parted, and anxiously paced the road, awaiting his
coming. At last, worn out by her long vigil, she sank down by the
wayside and expired. On the spot where she breathed her last the flower
appeared.[179]

There is a Japanese story in which a mother is represented as hearing
her dead son’s voice in the sighing of a sacred willow which grew above
his grave.[180] Grimm quotes other examples.[181] In the song of
Roncesvalles, a blackthorn grows above the dead Saracens, a white flower
above the dead Christians. In other legends white lilies grow from the
graves of persons unjustly executed. From a maiden’s grave grew three
lilies which none but her lover might pluck.

In all these legends we have a survival of very primitive ideas about
the soul, ideas out of which subsequently arose the formal doctrine of
transmigration. The immortality of the soul was accepted, but there was
always an inclination to quarter it in some new living thing. The
instances above given, in which it was thought to pass into some plant,
especially concern us, as illustrating the primitive belief that trees
and shrubs might contain a spirit in human form.

A further derivative of the assumed kinship between human and vegetable
life is the conception of the tree as sympathetically interwoven with
the life and fortunes of an individual, a family, or a community. “In
folktales the life of a person is sometimes so bound up with the life of
a plant that the withering of the plant will immediately follow or be
followed by the death of the person. Among the M‘Bengas in Western
Africa, about the Gaboon, when two children are born on the same day the
people plant two trees of the same kind and dance round them. The life
of each of the children is believed to be bound up with the life of one
of the trees, and if the tree dies or is thrown down they are sure that
the child will soon die. In the Cameroons, also, the life of a person is
believed to be sympathetically bound up with that of the tree. Some of
the Papuans unite the life of a new-born child sympathetically with that
of a tree, by driving a pebble into the bark of the tree. This is
supposed to give them complete mastery over the child’s life; if the
tree is cut down the child will die.”[182] According to the Talmud, the
destruction of Bithar, in which four hundred thousand Israelites lost
their lives, originated in the resentment of one of its inhabitants at
the wanton destruction of a young cedar-tree, which, according to the
custom of the place, he had planted at the birth of his child.[183]

It was usual amongst the Romans to plant a tree at the birth of a son,
and from its vigour to forecast the prosperity of the child. It is
related in the life of Virgil, that the poplar planted at his birth
flourished exceedingly, and far outstripped all its contemporaries. A
similar superstition has persisted even into times that are almost
contemporary. Lord Byron, for all his scepticism, had the idea that his
life and prosperity depended on the fate of an oak which he had planted
when he first visited Newstead.[184]

The mystical relationship of man and tree is further illustrated in an
old German belief quoted by Mannhardt, that a sick child placed in a
hole made in a tree by sawing off a branch, or by splitting it open with
a wedge, will recover as soon as the tree-wound heals. Should the child
die and the tree survive, the human soul will inhabit the tree for the
rest of its life.[185]

The family tree and the community tree were merely extensions of this
conception. The heroic descendants of Pelops regarded the plane-tree as
especially sacred to them and bound up with their fortunes, and in later
times we find families taking their names from trees. Mannhardt quotes
in this connection the German surnames Linde, Holunder, Kirschbaum,
Birnbaum, etc.[186]

But more important than the family tree is the community tree. In many
an old German village there stood a tree, often a May-tree, which the
villagers guarded as the apple of their eye. It was looked upon as the
life-tree, the tutelary genius, the second “I” of the whole community.
Devotions were paid to it and gifts offered as to a deity.[187] The
ancient fig-tree in the Comitium at Rome, already alluded to as a
supposed descendant of the very tree under which Romulus and Remus were
found, is another case in point.[188] It was held to be closely
connected with the fortunes of the city, and Tacitus describes the
terror of the Romans when, in the reign of Nero, it suddenly began to
flag and wither, and their relief when, upon the Emperor’s death, it was
found to have renewed its vigour.[189] Pliny tells of two myrtle-trees,
called the Patrician and Plebeian, which grew before the temple of
Quirinus at Rome. As sacred to Venus, and hence symbolical of union,
these trees were held to represent the amity which existed between the
two orders. At first they had grown with equal vigour, but when the
patricians began to encroach upon the power of the plebs their tree
outgrew the other, which languished beneath its baleful shadow. After
the Marsian war, however, from which date the power of the Senate began
to decline, it was noticed that the patrician tree showed signs of age,
while the plebeian sprouted forth with new vigour.[190] Curiously
enough, there is, or was so recently as 1885, an old tree in Jerusalem,
opposite Cook’s office, belonging to an old family and protected by the
Sultan’s firman, which the Arabs consider will fall when the Sultan’s
rule ends. “It lost a large limb during the Turco-Russian war, and is
now (1885) in a decayed state.”[191]

[Illustration: Fig. 24.—Imperial coin of Myra in Lycia, showing
tree-goddess.(Goblet d’Alviella.)]

From conceptions such as these the transition is easy to that wider view
which regarded the tree as the material representative of the mysterious
feminine reproductive power, the good genius of general prosperity. We
know that the Semitic nations worshipped under various names a great
mother-goddess, the progenitrix of gods and men, and there is evidence
to show that the tree was widely venerated as her divine symbol. In the
coins of Heliopolis (Baalbek), where this great deity was worshipped
under the name of Astarte, the figure of the goddess under the peristyle
of her temple is sometimes replaced by a pyramidal cypress. In a coin of
Myra, in Lycia, the bust of a goddess is represented in the foliage of a
tree.[192] The goddess, who is of the veiled archaic type and wears on
her head the _calathus_, the symbol of fertility, is identified by Mr.
Farnell with Artemis-Aphrodite, “who is here clearly conceived as a
divinity of vegetation.”[193] The Canaanites, and under their influence
the Israelites, worshipped Ashtaroth, the fruitful goddess, under the
symbol of an _ashêra_, a tree or pole, decked with fillets, like the
May-tree. An ancient Babylonian cylinder represents a decorated tree
with a worshipper beside it, who in the inscription invokes the goddess
as her servant.[194] On other cylinders the tree-symbol sometimes
accompanies and sometimes replaces the figure of Istar, the great
procreative goddess more or less related to the goddess of the
_ashêrim_.[195]

[Illustration: Fig. 25.—Sacred tree and worshipper.(Goblet d’Alviella.)]

The conception of the tree as the symbol of fertility seems to be still
more clearly emphasised in the Assyrian cylinders and bas-reliefs, where
it is conventionally represented as a date-palm between two personages,
who approach it from either side bearing in their hands a cone similar
to the inflorescence of the male date-palm. Mr. Tylor suggests that
these personages, variously represented as kings or priests, genii with
wings and heads of eagles, or mythical animals, may represent the
fertilising winds or divinities, whose procreative influence was
typified by the artificial fecundation of the palm, a procedure which is
necessary for its successful culture, and which we know from Herodotus
to have been familiar to the Babylonians.[196] The design is usually
surmounted by the winged disc representing the sun, and the whole is not
improbably meant to symbolise the mystery of procreation, in which the
male element enshrined in the sun, and the female element inhabiting the
tree are appropriately represented. The same collocation is met with on
an altar from the Palmyrene now in Rome, on one of the faces of which is
the image of a solar god, and on the other the figure of a cypress with
a child carrying a ram amidst its foliage.[197] In this connection it
may be remembered that Apuleius, wishing to paint the son of Venus in
his mother’s lap, is related to have depicted him in the midst of a
cypress-tree.

[Illustration: Fig. 26.—The sacred tree as symbol of fertility.(From an
Assyrian bas-relief. Perrot et Chipiez.)]

The above facts are important for their bearing on the conception of a
tree-inhabiting spirit of vegetation or generalised tree-soul, which, as
Mannhardt and Frazer have shown, lies at the root of many otherwise
inexplicable observances found amongst the peasantry in different
countries and at different periods of history. These customs will be
dealt with more fully in a subsequent chapter. In all of them we find a
tree, or the branch of a tree, or a human being or puppet dressed to
represent a tree, figuring as the symbol or representative of a spirit
who is regarded as more or less friendly to man, and endowed with the
power of assisting his material prosperity. In more primitive times than
the present this prosperity resolved itself into a question of
fecundity, and the power which could make the fields to bear, the flocks
to multiply, and women to give increase, naturally held the foremost
place in the affections of the people. The rich and the cultured found
other attributes to worship and other gods to personify them, but the
peasant clung to the observances by which the spirit of fertility was
propitiated. Hence the tree, long after it had ceased to be worshipped
as the home of the great gods, or to be regarded as the parent of
mankind, still held a firm place in the devotions of the people as the
embodiment of the all-powerful patron of universal fertility.

Of the innumerable observances founded on this idea the following may be
taken as a sample. The sacred chili or cedar of Gilgit, on the
north-western frontier of India, was held to have the power of causing
the herds to multiply and women to bear children. At the commencement of
wheat-sowing three chosen unmarried youths, who had undergone
purification for three days, started for the mountains where the cedars
grew, taking with them wine, oil, and bread, and fruit of every kind.
Having found a suitable tree they sprinkled the oil and wine on it,
while they ate the bread and fruit as a sacrificial feast. Then they cut
off a branch and brought it to the village, where amid general rejoicing
it was placed on a large stone beside running water. A goat was then
sacrificed and its blood poured over the cedar branch, while the
villagers danced around it. The goat’s flesh was eaten, and every man
went to his house bearing a spray of cedar. On his arrival he said to
his wife, “If you want children I have brought them to you; if you want
cattle I have brought them; whatever you want, I have it.”[198]

The same idea is no doubt to be traced in the form of survival, in the
custom of giving a branch of laurel to a bride which is found, according
to Mannhardt, at Carnac in Brittany;[199] in the introduction of a
decorated pine-bough into the house of the bride, met with in Little
Russia, as well as in the ceremony of “carrying the May,” adorned with
lights, before the bride and bridegroom in Hanoverian weddings.[200]

The day of these observances is past, but underlying them there was a
vital and still valid truth. To us as to the ancients the tree is still
the patron of fertility, as those have discovered to their cost who have
bared a country of its forests. To us as to them it is still the thing
of all things living that is endowed with the most enduring life, the
most persistent vigour. Generations come and go, but the tree lives on
and every spring puts forth new leaves, and every autumn bears new seed,
and even to its last decrepitude the leaves are as green and the seeds
as full of life as in the prime of its youth. What changes has not the
oldest tree in England witnessed! In the southern counties there is an
ancient way, once thronged by travellers, but now deserted and broken in
its continuity; yet to this day, even where parks and pastures have
overlain it, its course may still be traced by the yew-trees planted at
its side by pilgrims journeying to the shrine of St. Thomas of
Canterbury, in the days when their brothers were fighting for the White
Rose or the Red.




                               CHAPTER V
                           THE TREE AS ORACLE


Amongst the innumerable sources from which the nations of antiquity
professed to derive knowledge of futurity and practical guidance in the
affairs of life the tree held a very prominent place. Tree-oracles
formed, indeed, the natural corollary of tree-worship, and their number
and popularity provide additional testimony to the genuineness and
extent of the ancient belief that certain trees were tenanted by a
supernatural essence. For it was as “animated demoniac beings,” to use
Robertson Smith’s phrase, that trees possessed oracular virtue. It was
the god dwelling in them who produced the mysterious rustlings and
movements of the branches, from which the responses were interpreted by
the attendant priests. But according to the ancient view the tree
derived a further title to its oracular prestige from its connection by
means of its roots with the under-world, the mysterious abode of
departed spirits, in whom wisdom and knowledge of the future were
supposed to be vested. Thus the special prophetic power attributed to
the variety of oak (probably the _Quercus esculus_) which grew at Dodona
was ascribed by later writers to the fact that its roots pierced the
earth more deeply than those of other trees, reaching down even to
Tartarus (_tantum radice in Tartara_).[201] It was from this under-world
that Saul summoned Samuel, and it was in the hope of obtaining help from
the spirit of some dead hero by means of a dream, that men were wont to
pass the night at his tomb or his temple. The modern Arabs who still
worship certain sacred trees, as the place where angels or _jinni_
descend, believe that a sick man who sleeps under such a tree will
receive counsel in a dream for the restoration of his health.[202]

Of organised oracles the earliest was no doubt the earth oracle, and the
part played in the ceremonial by natural fissures, springs, and trees
probably grew out of their close connection with the earth. The most
famous oracle of antiquity, that of Delphi, was situated at the opening
of a natural cleft in the rock, believed to be at the very centre of the
earth, and was originally presided over by the great earth-mother, Gaia,
the subordinate part played by the laurel which once grew near the cleft
being expressed by the legend that Daphne was the daughter and priestess
of Gaia.[203] The procedure at another famous oracle, that of Trophonius
at Lebadea, near Mount Helicon in Boeotia, was distinctly modelled on
the idea of a descent into the under-world,[204] the suppliant obtaining
his answer in a cave, where his experiences were so terrible that he
never smiled again; whence it came to be said of any particularly
lugubrious individual that he had consulted the oracle of Trophonius. A
still more striking illustration of the antiquity of this conception is
found in the account of the initiation of an augur given on a Babylonian
tablet in the British Museum. The candidate is there made to descend
into an artificial imitation of the lower world, where he beholds “the
altars amidst the waters, the treasures of Anu, Bel, and Ea, the tablets
of the gods, the delivering of the oracle of heaven and earth, and the
cedar-tree, the beloved of the great gods.”[205] Here the earth-oracle
and the tree-oracle are seen in very early conjunction; but the belief
in the divine power inherent in the tree can be traced still farther
back, for in a bilingual text of much earlier date we read of “the
cedar-tree, the tree that shatters the power of the incubus, upon whose
core is recorded the name of Ea,” _i.e._ the god of wisdom.[206]

The idea of the tree-oracle was familiar to other branches of the
Semitic race, and is expressed in their common tradition of a tree of
knowledge. Several allusions to oracular trees are met with in the Old
Testament. That Jehovah should speak to Moses out of the burning-bush,
if not to be regarded as a case in point, was at any rate quite in
conformity with surrounding tradition, for there is no doubt that the
belief in trees as places of divine revelation was very prevalent in
Canaan. The famous holy tree near Shechem, called the tree of the
soothsayers in Judges ix. 37, and the tree or trees of the revealer in
Genesis xii. 6 and Deuteronomy xi. 30, must have been the seat of a
Canaanite tree-oracle.[207] The prophetess Deborah gave her responses
under a palm near Bethel, which, according to sacred tradition, marked
the grave of the nurse of Rachel. And David, when he inquired of the
Lord as to the right moment for attacking the Philistines, received the
signal in “the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry-trees.”[208]
The _ashêra_ or artificial tree in which the deity was supposed to dwell
also appears to have been used by the Canaanites for the purposes of
divination, a practice probably alluded to in the rebuke of the prophet,
“My people ask counsel at their stock, and their staff declareth unto
them.”[209]

But by far the most striking instance of a tree-oracle, and perhaps one
may even say the most signal vestige of the primitive tree-worship, was
the oracle of the Pelasgic Zeus at Dodona in Epirus. Here in a grove of
oaks there was a very ancient tree, believed to be the actual seat of
the deity, whose responses were interpreted from the rustling of its
branches, from the murmur of the sacred spring which welled forth at its
foot, or from the drawing of the oracle lots kept in an urn beneath it.
The origin of the oracle is lost in prehistoric gloom; probably it
existed earlier than the worship of Zeus himself. Homer makes Ulysses
visit it,[210] and Hesiod states that Zeus dwelt there in the trunk of a
tree.[211] Herodotus affirms, on the testimony both of the priestesses
of Dodona and of the Egyptian priests at Thebes, that the oracle was
introduced from Egypt, and adds that the manner in which oracles were
delivered at Thebes and at Dodona was very similar. The priests at
Thebes told him that two women employed in their temple had been
captured by Phoenicians, and sold the one into Libya, the other to the
Greeks; the former established the oracle of Zeus Ammon in the Libyan
desert, the latter that of Dodona. In the account given him by the
Dodonaean priestesses, it was asserted that the oracles were founded by
two black pigeons from Thebes.[212] We know from other sources that the
oracle of Zeus-Ammon was vested in an ancient tree (γεράνδρυον).[213]
But whatever may have been its origin there is no doubt that the oracle
of Dodona had a long and active career, continuing for close upon two
thousand years. Silius Italicus, towards the end of the first century
A.D., reiterates the statement of Hesiod that the deity at Dodona
occupied a tree;[214] Pausanias a hundred years later found the tree
still green and flourishing,[215] and Philostratos about the same time
saw it adorned with wreaths and sacred fillets, “because, like the
Delphic tripod, it gave forth oracles.”[216] A later writer states that
the oracular voices ceased on the felling of the tree by a certain
Illyrian bandit,[217] but there is evidence that the tree and the oracle
were still in existence in the middle of the fourth century A.D. These
ancient testimonies to the importance of the oracle have been
marvellously corroborated by the discovery in the course of recent
excavations of a large number of leaden tablets inscribed with the
questions addressed to the god by his votaries, and dating from 400 B.C.
onwards.[218]

According to classical mythology, the oracular virtue of the famous oak
of Dodona was not only transmitted to its offshoots, but even preserved
in the dead wood after its separation from the tree. Ovid, in relating
the story of the plague of Aegina, tells how Aeacus, standing beneath

  A branching oak, the Sire’s own tree, from seed
  Of old Dodona sprung,

calls upon Zeus to repeople his stricken kingdom, and fill his desolate
walls anew with citizens as numerous as the ants at his feet.

                            Not a breath
  Was stirring, but the branches shook, the leaves
  With rustling murmur waved.

Accepting the omen he kisses the sacred tree, falls asleep beneath it,
and wakes to find that the ants have been miraculously changed into men,
the famous Myrmidons.[219] Again, it is related by more than one author
that when the good ship _Argo_ was built, Athena introduced into it by
way of amulet a beam hewn in the grove of Dodona, which in the
subsequent voyage constantly gave the Argonauts warning and advice.[220]

At the famous oracle of Delphi the tree played as intrinsic, if not so
predominant, a part as at Dodona, its function being shared by the
fissure in the earth and the sacred spring, which testify to the
chthonic origin of the oracle, whilst the use of the sacred tripod has
been thought to connect it with the class of fire oracles.[221] There is
evidence that a laurel-tree grew beside the oracular fissure in Gaia’s
time,[222] and, according to tradition, the earliest temple of Apollo
was a hut of laurel boughs erected by the god’s own hands.[223] And
later on, when the original tree had disappeared and the fissure had
been enclosed in the Adytum, the entrance to the latter, as well as the
tripod on which the Pythia sat, were hidden in fresh laurel leaves
whenever the oracle was given, and the priestess having chewed laurel
leaves and crowned herself with a wreath of the sacred plant, waved a
laurel branch while chanting her ecstatic utterances. Every ninth year,
moreover, a bower of laurel branches was erected in the forecourt of the
temple. It is uncertain how far Apollo’s close connection with the
laurel may have originated from Delphi, but it is a fact that in later
times his oracular function was inseparably bound up with the use of
that tree, and the laurel became the recognised instrument of prophecy
(_per lauros geomantis_). And at Delphi, when the laurel trees had
disappeared, the oracle ceased, for the messenger sent by the Emperor
Julian to reinaugurate it received for answer, “Tell the king that the
cunningly-built chamber has fallen to the ground; Apollo no longer has
bower, or inspired laurel, or prophetic spring; vanished is the talking
water.”[224]

To pass briefly over other examples of tree-oracle, in Armenia the
fire-priests were wont to interpret the will of the god from the
movements observed in the branches of the holy plane-tree at
Armavira.[225] The Chaldaeo-Assyrians read the future in the rustling of
the leaves of the prophetic trees.[226] At Nejrân, in Yemen, the Arabs
professed to obtain oracles from the spirit who inhabited a sacred
date-palm.[227]

In the Sháh Námeh, Firdausi, working no doubt upon an ancient tradition,
tells how Sikander, or Alexander the Great, consulted a tree-oracle in
Persia.[228] “From thence he proceeded to another city, where he was
received with great homage by the most illustrious of the nation. He
inquired of them if there were anything wonderful or extraordinary in
their country, that he might go to see it, and they replied that there
were two trees in the kingdom, one a male, the other a female, from
which a voice proceeded. The male tree spoke in the day and the female
tree in the night, and whoever had a wish went thither to have his
desires accomplished. Sikander immediately repaired to the spot, and
approaching it, he hoped in his heart that a considerable part of his
life still remained to be enjoyed. When he came under the tree a
terrible sound arose and rang in his ears, and he asked the people
present what it meant. The attendant priest said it implied that
fourteen years of his life still remained. Sikander at this
interpretation of the prophetic sound wept, and the burning tears ran
down his cheeks. Again he asked, ‘Shall I return to Rúm and see my
mother and children before I die?’ and the answer was, ‘Thou wilt die at
Kashán.’”

Amongst the Romans other forms of augury appear to have taken the place
of the old tree-oracles and reduced them to comparative insignificance.
The most important of those that remained was the prophetic ilex grove
upon the Aventine hill, sacred to Faunus and Picus. Hither the applicant
came, fasting and meanly clothed, and having crowned himself with beech
leaves, sacrificed two sheep to the deities of the grove, and laying
himself down upon their pelts, awaited the counsel of the gods in his
dream.[229] There was another grove oracle of Faunus at Tibur by the
Albunean spring,[230] and at the neighbouring Preneste, where the oracle
of Jupiter was held in great repute, the oracle lots were fashioned from
the wood of his sacred oak.[231] At the more sequestered Tiora Matiena
the tree-oracle appears to have dwindled into a mere vestige, the
responses being given by a woodpecker perched upon an oaken column.[232]

To tree-omens, as distinguished from tree-oracles, the Romans attached
much importance, and they possessed several treatises dealing with such
portents. The family and community tree described in the last chapter
had a certain oracular character, and foretold in its own fortunes the
prosperity or adversity of those whom it represented. The withering of
the laurel grove of Augustus was held to portend the death of Nero, and
with him the extinction of the Augustan house and its adopted members;
the fall of Vespasian’s cypress foretold the death of Domitian. If the
sacred tree attached to a sanctuary were uprooted by the wind, it was a
clear proof that the deity had withdrawn his protection, and unless the
tree upreared itself anew, his worship at that spot was discontinued.
The Sibylline books contained explicit instructions with regard to these
eventualities and were invariably consulted in every such case.
Innumerable instances of these tree-omens are given in classical
literature.[233]

The legends of trees which spoke intelligibly belong rather to myth than
to history, but they were quite in accordance with the ancient belief
that any tree which contained a tree-soul, were it the spirit of a god
or only that of a dryad, might express itself in words. Thus the spirits
inhabiting the three trees of the Hesperides gave advice to the
wandering Argonauts. Philostratus relates that at the command of
Apollonius a tree addressed him in a distinct female voice.[234] When
Rome was invaded by the Gauls a voice from out of the grove of Vesta
warned the Romans to repair their walls or their city would fall.[235]
And after the battle in which Brutus and Aruns Tarquinius slew each
other, a powerful voice from the neighbouring grove of Arsia announced
that the victory lay with the Romans.[236] A later instance is that of
the _gharcad_ tree which spoke to Moslim b. ‘Ocba in a dream, and
designated him to the command of the army of Yazīd against Medina.[237]

It has already been mentioned that the responses at Dodona were
sometimes interpreted from the oracle lots kept in an urn that stood
upon a sacred table beneath the tree, and the same form of divination
was also apparently in use at Delphi,[238] whilst at Preneste it was the
sole method employed. Indeed this outgrowth of the tree-oracle was in
common use throughout the ancient world. There is a probable allusion to
it in Ezekiel xxi. 21. The Scythian soothsayers were wont to divine by
the help of a number of willow rods, which they placed upon the ground,
uttering their predictions as they gathered them up one by one. They
also practised divination by means of the bark of the linden-tree.[239]
Amongst the neighbouring Alani, in Sarmatia, women foretold the future
by means of straight rods cut with secret enchantments at certain times
and marked very carefully.[240] The Germans used to divine by means of
the fragments of a branch cut from a fruit-tree, which they threw on to
a white cloth.[241] The omen sticks of the Druids, frequently referred
to in the Bardic poems, were probably rods cut from a fruit-tree and
marked with mystical emblems.[242]

It is not easy to define the exact connection between these oracle-lots
and that strange survival, the divining-rod, but it may be taken for
certain that the belief in the efficacy of the latter is “a superstition
cognate to the belief in sacred trees,”[243] and that the idea
underlying both the oracle-lot and the divining-rod was that they were
animated by an indwelling spirit, probably by the spirit of the tree
from which they were cut. We know from Pliny and Pausanias that the
earliest images of the gods were made of wood, and that the Greeks,
Romans, and other pre-Christian nations worshipped stakes or peeled rods
of wood, painted, or dressed, or roughly carved in the semblance of an
anthropomorphic god, and supposed to be inhabited by a divine essence.
It was probably by a similar mode of reasoning that the spear, the
sceptre, the staff of the general, the standards of the army, the
herald’s wand, the rods of the flamens, the lituus of the augur, and the
truncheon of the constable came to be symbolically representative of
power and inviolability, the primitive assumption being that they
retained some of the divine spirit resident in the tree from which they
were cut.[244] From a similar parentage sprang the popular custom of
striking men, cattle, and plants with a green switch (Lebensrute) at
certain seasons of the year in order to make them fruitful, an
observance of which so many instances have been collected by Mannhardt.
“It was the tree-soul, the spirit of vegetation,” he concludes,
“communicated by means of this switching, which drove away the demons of
sickness and sterility and evoked fruitfulness and health.”[245] The
divining-rod is, if one may say so, first cousin to the “life-rood.”
Each represents and embodies a different function of the
supernatural—the one its procreative, the other its prophetic attribute.
The divining-rod is the meagre survival of the once renowned
tree-oracle.

It may seem strange that in this positive age there should exist people
calling themselves educated, who believe that a stick cut from a hazel
or thorn-bush may in the hands of a specially endowed person possess a
magical power of revealing the secrets of the earth. But so it is. There
are in this country at the present hour some half-dozen professional
experts, who claim the faculty of discovering unsuspected springs of
water by means of the divining-rod, and furnish well-attested instances
of their success. It is not necessary to discuss the credibility of
their assertions or to formulate a theory to account for their success.
The subject of the divining-rod concerns us only in so far as it is a
vestige—a poor and atrophied vestige—of the magic eloquence once
associated with the sacred tree. It is impossible to say when the use of
the divining-rod first originated. It is mentioned in the Vedas, and is
well known to have flourished amongst the Chaldaeans and Egyptians. But
in those early days the function of the magical rod was not restricted,
as it was later and is now, to the search for water or buried treasure.
The Greeks and Romans found many uses for it. Cicero speaks of providing
for one’s wants, _quasi virgulâ divinâ, ut aiunt_. It was a familiar
instrument in the hands of the British Druids, and is still largely
employed in China. Mediaeval writers speak of it as being in very common
use among the miners of Germany.[246]

At all times and in all places the act of cutting and preparing the rod
has been the subject of much ceremony. It had to be severed at a
particular moment, and from a particular kind of tree, the latter
varying according to the country. As a rule a fruit-tree, or some other
tree that was useful and beneficent to man, was chosen. The Chinese
prefer the peach; the Druids made choice of the apple-tree.[247]
Elsewhere the hazel, the willow, and the black-thorn have been selected,
and the last-named is still known in Germany as the “wishing-thorn,” as
it is the tree from which wishing-rods were cut. The time at which the
rod was cut was equally important. For centuries the Chinese have
adhered to the first new moon after the winter solstice as the most
favourable date for the ceremony. The French custom was to cut it on
Mercury’s day (Wednesday) at the planetary hour of Mercury.[248] In
Sweden divining-rods of mistletoe are cut on midsummer eve.[249] Even in
comparatively modern times believers in the divining-rod professed to
expect more of a rod which had been cut between sunset and sunrise, upon
some holy day or at new moon, from a branch on which the rising sun
first shone.[250]

These mystic observances smack of a far-distant past, and the modern
water-finder appears to have discarded them. His practice is to cut a
forked branch about eighteen inches in length from any convenient hazel
or white-thorn bush, and grasping the prongs very firmly between the
thumb and two first fingers of each hand, the joint being held
downwards, he walks over the ground where it is desired to find water.
If he approaches a hidden spring, the joint will begin to rise against
his will, and when he has reached it, will make a complete half
revolution, breaking or bending the twigs held in his hands, until the
joint is uppermost. The depth of the spring is estimated by the force
with which the rod is repelled from it. The mental exhaustion of the
operator after a successful operation is said to be considerable. In an
old volume of the _Quarterly Review_ (No. 44) an account is given of a
certain Lady Noel who was skilful in the use of the divining-rod. She
used a thin forked hazel-twig, which immediately bent when she came over
the underground spring, its motion being more or less rapid as she
approached or withdrew from the spot. “When just over it the twig turned
so quick as to snap, breaking near the fingers, which by pressing it
were indented and heated and almost blistered. A degree of agitation was
also visible in her face.”

Many of the superstitious practices that still survive in remote
villages are no doubt of the same ancestry as the divining-rod. In the
valley of Lanzo in Piedmont, lovers in doubt whether to marry consult
the oracle in the form of a herb called _concordia_, the root of which
is shaped like two hands, each with its five fingers. If the herb they
find has the hands conjoined, the omen is favourable; but unfavourable
if the hands point different ways.[251]

The following naïve recital is quoted in Brand’s antiquities:—“Last
Friday was Valentine’s day, and the night before I got five bay-leaves,
and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth
to the middle; and then, if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we
should be married before the year was out.”[252] This belief in the
magical power of certain leaves is enshrined in many jingles, still
found in the rustic formulary, such as—

  The even ash-leaf in my glove
  The first I meet shall be my love;[253]

or

  Find even ash or four-leaved clover
  And you’ll see your true love before the day’s over.[254]

In old days on St. Valentine’s eve many a rustic maid has sprinkled
bay-leaves with rose-water and laid them across her pillow, and then
lying down in a clean night-gown, turned wrong side out, has softly
recited—

  Good Valentine, be kind to me,
  In dreams let me my true love see;[255]

or, if she were a Staffordshire lass, she probably preferred St.
Thomas’s eve, and having placed a sprig of evergreen under her pillow,
sighed—

  Good St. Thomas, stand by my bed
  And tell me when I shall be wed.[256]

To those who are new to the subject of comparative mythology these
doggrels whispered by foolish country girls under the stress of a
natural impulse may seem absurdly irrelevant. But to that science which
strives to unravel the beliefs and ideas of long dead people, every
vestige, every survival is important. The charms above mentioned did not
spring, fully matured, from the brain of some peculiarly inventive
dairy-maid. They have a long, long pedigree, and, like the zebra stripe
which will sometimes appear on a purebred horse, they throw us back to
an age when man believed that the world was controlled by spirits, and
that he, like everything else, was but a puppet in their hands.




                               CHAPTER VI
                           THE UNIVERSE-TREE


One of the most interesting points in connection with tree myths is the
wide distribution of the conception of the cosmogonic or world-tree, of
which the Scandinavian Yggdrasil is the most familiar example. The idea
is met with amongst the ancient Chaldaeans, the Egyptians, the Persians,
the Hindus, and the Aryan races of Northern Europe, as well as in the
mythology of China and Japan; and this community of tradition has been
regarded by some authorities as pointing to a prehistoric intercourse
between these widely-separated races, if not to their common
origin.[257] But, apart from the fact that the same conception is also
found in a rudimentary form amongst the aborigines of New Zealand and
America, it is not difficult to imagine that it may have occurred
separately to more than one inquirer. In short, “the idea of referring
to the form of a tree the apparent conformation of the universe is one
of the most natural methods of reasoning which can occur to the savage
mind.”[258] The moment he began to concern himself with such questions,
the primitive thinker must have asked himself why the heavenly
firmament, with its sun and stars and the waters above it, did not fall
to earth like everything else within his knowledge. His mind naturally
demanded some prop or support to antagonise what in his experience was
the unrestricted despotism of geocentric gravitation. The Egyptian
explained the problem by representing the sky as the star-spangled body
of the goddess Nu̔ît, who had been separated from her husband Sibû, the
earth, by the efforts of Shû. In the mythology of the Maoris, Rangi, the
sky, was forcibly separated from his wife, the universal mother, earth,
by one of their children, Tane Mahuta, father of forests, who planting
his head upon the earth, upheld the heavens with his feet.[259]

The fact that the celestial bodies were observed to revolve around a
fixed point rendered it a necessity that this assumed support of the
heaven should be of the nature of a central axis, upholding the sky-roof
as the pole upholds a tent. To the inhabitants of mountainous countries,
who saw the clouds resting upon the peaks, the idea of a
heaven-supporting mountain no doubt presented itself as the most
reasonable solution. Thus Aristotle, to quote Lord Bacon, “elegantly
expoundeth the ancient fable of Atlas (that stood fixed and bare up the
heaven from falling) to be meant of the poles or axle-tree of heaven.”
To plain-dwellers, however, the tree was the loftiest object within
their experience, and it may be conjectured that the idea of a central
world-supporting tree was a product of the lowlands. In some cases the
two conceptions were combined and the world-tree was placed on the
summit of a world-mountain. It is interesting, however, to note that the
earliest known version of a world-tree, pure and simple, comes to us
from the fertile alluvial plain on the borders of the Persian Gulf. The
account, contained in an old bilingual hymn, and probably of Accadian
origin, represents the tree as growing in the garden of Edin or Eden,
placed by Babylonian tradition in the immediate vicinity of Eridu, a
city which flourished at the mouth of the Euphrates between 3000 and
4000 B.C.

  In Eridu a stalk grew overshadowing; in a holy place did it become
              green;
  Its roots were of white crystal, which stretched towards the deep.
  (Before) Ea was its course in Eridu, teeming with fertility;
  Its seat was the (central place of the earth);
  Its foliage (?) was the couch of Zikum the (primaeval) mother.
  Into the heart of its holy house, which spread its shade like a
              forest, hath no man entered.
  (There is the home) of the mighty mother who passes across the sky.
  In the midst of it was Tammuz.
  There is the shrine of the two (gods).[260]

Of this glorified tree or stem it is to be observed that it grew at the
centre of the earth; that its roots pierced down into the abysmal watery
deep, where the amphibious Ea, the god of wisdom, had his seat, and
whence he nourished the earth with springs and streams; that its foliage
supported Zikum, the primordial heavens, and overshadowed the earth,
which was apparently regarded as a plane placed midway between the
firmament above and the deep below. The stem itself was the home of
Davkina, consort of Ea, the great mother, “the lady of the Earth,” and
of her son Tammuz, a temple too sacred for mortals to enter.

Even were it not to be inferred from other evidence, there could be
little doubt that the people amongst whom the above conception arose
must have been already familiar with tree-worship. The mighty stem, in
which the great gods dwelt, was but a poetical amplification of the
sacred, spirit-inhabited tree, and arose out of the same idealising
process as that which gave birth to the nearly related tree of knowledge
and tree of life.

Side by side with that of a world-tree the conception of a
world-mountain is also met with in the primitive cosmogony of the
Chaldaeans, but while the former tradition belonged to Sumir or Southern
Babylonia, the latter seems to have prevailed in the Northern Accad,
whose inhabitants had once been mountain-dwellers.[261] This “mountain
of the world,” “whose head rivalled the heaven,” which had the pure deep
for its foundation and was the home of the gods, was placed in the
north, and its worship survived in that of the “illustrious mounds” of
the Babylonian plain, which were equally regarded as the visible
habitation of divine spirits. Isaiah represents the king of Babylon as
boasting, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the
stars of God; and I will sit upon the mount of congregation, in the
uttermost parts of the north.”[262] It seems clear that the prophet is
alluding to the myth of a Chaldaean Olympus, where the gods held their
assemblies. In one of the Babylonian hymns this mountain is addressed
as, “O thou who givest shade, Lord who castest thy shadow over the land,
great mount,”[263] from which it might appear that the idea of the
world-mountain was not very strictly dissociated from that of a
world-tree.

In the corresponding cosmogony, which was current five thousand years
later amongst the Scandinavians, the two conceptions were unequivocally
combined. The Norse Yggdrasil, in spite of the many quaint symbolical
fancies which have been embroidered on to the main conception,
represents such a remarkable amalgamation of ideas originally Oriental
that it is difficult to believe that it can have had a totally
independent origin. The world-mountain, the world-tree with the birds in
its branches, and the connection of the latter with another peculiarly
Eastern idea, that of the food of the gods, are all reproduced in the
cosmogonic traditions of the Eddas, and it is highly probable that they
formed part of a primitive folk-lore common to the different races. As
their culture grew the Chaldaeans gave up their earlier conception, and
came to regard the earth as a gigantic bowl floating bottom upwards upon
the deep, but to the Norse poet the world still remained a flat disc
surrounded by a river ocean, and limited by mountain ranges. In its
centre Asgard, the mountain of the gods, was pierced by a mighty tree
trunk, the branches of which overshadowed the world and supported the
sky, the stars, and the clouds, whilst its roots stretched downwards
into the primordial abyss. The apples stored in Valhal, by eating which
the gods preserved their youth, closely correspond to the amrita or soma
which, as we shall see, was a peculiar feature of the Eastern conception
of the world-tree.

“The chief and most holy seat of the gods,” say the Eddas, “is by the
ash Yggdrasil. There the gods meet in council every day. It is the
greatest and best of all trees, its branches spread over all the world
and reach above heaven. Three roots sustain the tree and stand wide
apart: one is with the Asa; the second with the Frost-giants; the third
reaches into Niflheim, and under it is Hvergelmer, where Nidhug gnaws
the root from below. But under the second root, which extends to the
Frost-giants, is the well of Mimer, wherein knowledge and wisdom are
concealed. The third root of the ash is in heaven, and beneath it is the
most sacred fountain of Urd. Here the gods have their doomstead. The Asa
ride thither every day over Bifrost, which is also called Asa-bridge.
There stands a beautiful hall near the fountain beneath the ash. Out of
it come three maids. These maids shape the lives of men and we call them
the Norns. On the boughs of the ash sits an eagle, who knows many
things. Between his eyes sits the hawk, called Vedfolner. A squirrel, by
name Ratatösk, springs up and down the tree and bears words of hate
between the eagle and Nidhug. Four stags leap about in the branches of
the ash and bite the buds. The Norns that dwell by the fountain of Urd
every day take water from the fountain, and clay that lies around the
fountain, and sprinkle therewith the ash, in order that its branches may
not wither or decay.... In Valhal there is a chest, kept by Ithun, in
which are the apples that the gods must bite when they grow old, in
order to become young again.”[264]

In the above description the various denizens of the tree have been
supposed to symbolise natural phenomena. The stags who bite the buds are
the four cardinal winds; the eagle and the hawk represent respectively
the air and the wind-still ether; the serpent Nidhug who gnaws the root
in the subterranean abyss symbolises volcanic forces, and the squirrel,
who runs up and down the tree, hail and other atmospheric phenomena.

[Illustration: Fig. 27.—Yggdrasil—the Scandinavian world-tree.(From Finn
Magnusen’s Eddalaeren.)]

A similar if somewhat less detailed symbolism is met with in both the
Indian and Persian traditions of the world-tree, a symbolism which often
obscures and overshadows its cosmic function. In both countries the
mythical tree was venerated rather as a tree of life, the source of the
immortalising soma or haoma, than as the supporter of the universe. The
latter function was not indeed quite lost sight of, for the Kalpadruma
of the Vedas was a cloud-tree of colossal size, which grew on a steep
mountain, and by its shadow produced day and night before the creation
of the sun and moon; and in the Rig-Veda Brahma himself is described as
the vast over-spreading tree of the universe, of which the gods are the
branches. Similarly in Persian legend, near the haoma-tree stood the
tree of all seeds, frequented by two birds, one of which when he settled
on it broke off a thousand branches and caused their seeds to fall,
while the other carried them to a place whence they might be conveyed to
the earth with the rain. The same idea, even to the two birds, recurs in
the Indian traditions of the mystical soma-tree, which, besides
producing the immortalising drink, also bore fruit and seed of every
kind. It was from this tree that the immortals shaped the heaven and the
earth: it grew in the third heaven, overshadowing it with its branches.
Beneath it sat the gods, quaffing the precious soma, whereby they
preserved their immortality.

Amongst the followers of Buddha this tradition of a supernatural tree
underwent a further process of idealisation. Their fancy described it as
covered with divine flowers, and gleaming with every kind of precious
stone. To its smallest leaf it was formed of gems. It grew on a pure and
level sward, resplendent in colour as the peacock’s neck. It received
the homage of the gods.[265] It was beneath this tree that Gautama took
his seat, resolved not to stir until he had attained to perfect
knowledge. The tempter Mâra, with his hosts of demons, assailed him with
fiery darts, with rain in floods and hurricanes; but the Buddha remained
unmoved, until the defeated demons fled away. This is probably a
Buddhist rendering of the Vedic account of the great fight between the
powers of light and darkness for the clouds and the ambrosia they
contained. Gautama also wins the victory, but for him it is knowledge
and enlightenment that should constitute the true object of human
desire.

Briefer references to the cosmic tree are met with in the traditions of
other races. According to the Phoenicians the universe was framed on the
model of a tent, its axis a revolving cosmic tree, supporting a blue
canopy on which the heavenly bodies were embroidered. The Egyptians, in
one of their schemes of the universe, also represented the central axis
as a colossal tree, on whose branches Bennu the sun god perched. It gave
forth celestial rain, which descended on the fields of Lower Egypt, and
penetrated to the under-world to refresh those who are in Amenti. The
Osirian Tât-pillar, alluded to in a previous chapter, is thought by
Professor Tiele to be derived from the conception of the world-pillar,
though M. Maspero regards its cosmic symbolism as a later accretion.

“On a post on which is graven a human countenance, and which is covered
with gay clothing, stands the so-called Tât-pillar, entirely made up of
superimposed capitals, one of which has a rude face scratched upon it,
intended no doubt to represent the shining sun. On the top of the pillar
is placed the complete head-dress of Osiris, the ram’s horns, the sun,
the ureus adder, the double feather, all emblems of light and
sovereignty, which in my judgment must have been intended to represent
the highest heaven.”[266]

The conception of the world-tree is also found in the golden gem-bearing
tree of the sky, where, according to Egyptian mythology, Nu̔ît had her
abode. “She is goddess of the heavenly ocean, whose body is decked with
stars. The pilgrim to the lower world eats of the fruit, and the goddess
leaning from the tree pours out the water of life.” This was in the west
on the way travelled by the dead. To the east there was another tree,
with wide radiating branches bearing jewels, up which the strong morning
sun, Horus, climbed to the zenith of heaven. It has been suggested that
this “Sycamore of Emerald” was a mythological rendering of the beautiful
green tints on the horizon at the rising and setting of the sun.[267]

The tradition of a universe-tree is found also in China and Japan. The
legends of the latter country speak of an enormous metal pine which
grows in the north at the centre of the world.[268] In Chinese mythology
seven miraculous trees once flourished on the Kuen Lün Mountains. One of
them, which was of jade, bore fruit that conferred immortality; another,
named Tong, grew on the highest peak, “hard by the closed gate of
heaven.”[269]

It is interesting to find somewhat similar traditions current in the New
World. According to the cosmogony of the Sia Indians—a small diminished
tribe inhabiting New Mexico—there was in each of the six regions of the
world, North, South, East, West, Zenith, and Nadir, a mountain bearing a
giant tree, in a spring at the foot of which dwelt one of the six “cloud
rulers,” each attended by one of the six primal Sia priestesses, chosen
by the arch-mother to intercede with the cloud rulers to send rain to
the Sia. The six trees were specified as the spruce, pine, aspen, cedar,
and two varieties of the oak.[270]

The beautiful conception met with in some of the above traditions, by
which the stars were compared at once to gems and to the fruits of a
mighty tree, is frequently encountered in ancient literature. The
Arabians represented the zodiac as a tree with twelve branches, of which
the stars were the fruit, and a somewhat similar idea appears in the
Apocalyptic tree of life, which “bare twelve manner of fruits, and
yielded her fruit every month.”[271] The Babylonian hero Gilgames, in
his wanderings beyond the gates of ocean, came upon a forest, which

  To the forest of the trees of the gods in appearance was equal;
                Emeralds it carried as its fruit;
  The branch refuses not to support a canopy;
                Crystal they carried as shoots,
  Fruit they carry and to the sight it is glistening.[272]

The device of a golden tree hung with jewels, which is common throughout
the East in all fine goldsmiths’ work, and a good example of which was
formerly one of the treasures of the palace of the Great Mogul at
Agra,[273] was no doubt derived from the conception of a star-bearing
world-tree. For it must be remembered that the ancients believed gems to
be self-lustrous like the stars. Homer’s palaces emitted a radiance like
moonlight, and the columns of gold and emerald seen by Herodotus at Tyre
gave out light.[274]

We have no direct instance of gem-bearing trees in Greek mythology,
though the golden apples of the Hesperides growing on Mount Atlas, the
sky-sustaining mountain in the country beyond the north wind, had
evidently some kinship to the jewelled fruit of Eastern legend.

In addition to the Norse Yggdrasil, there are other traces of the
tradition of a world-tree to be met with amongst European nations. The
Russians have a legend, derived from Byzantium, of an iron-tree, the
root of which is the power of God, while its head sustains the three
worlds, the heavenly ocean of air, the earth, and hell with its burning
fire and brimstone.[275] Amongst the Saxons the idea of a world-tree
seems to have persisted even to the time of Charlemagne, who in the
course of his campaign against them in 772 A.D. solemnly destroyed as a
heathen idol their Irmensûl or “World-pillar,” a lofty tree-trunk, which
they worshipped as typifying the universal column that supports all
things. Mannhardt, however, regards the Irmensûl as simply a national
tree, corresponding to the community trees already mentioned, and
explains Charlemagne’s act as a political rather than a religious
one.[276]

In the Cathedral at Hildesheim there is an ancient stone column known as
the Irmensäule (though its claim to the name is disputed), which was dug
up under Louis le Débonnaire, and transformed into a candelabrum
surmounted by an image of the Virgin,[277] the conception of moral
support thus taking the place of the grosser idea of a material stay.

As in Eastern legend the universe-tree was venerated as something more
than a mere material supporter of the world, being sometimes the giver
of wisdom and sometimes the conveyer of immortality, so in European myth
it is found linked with a similar beneficence. In the legends of the
Finns its branches are represented as conferring “eternal welfare,” and
“the delight that never ceases.” The Kalevala, which dates back to an
unknown antiquity, relates how the last of created trees, the oak,
sprang from the magic acorn planted by the hero Wainamoinen in the ashes
of burnt hay which had been mown by the water-maidens:—

  Spreads the oak-tree many branches,
  Rounds itself a broad corona,
  Raises it above the storm clouds;
  Far it stretches out its branches,
  Stops the white clouds in their courses,
  With its branches hides the sunlight,
  With its many leaves the moonbeams,
  And the starlight dies in heaven.

  Sad the lives of man and hero,
  Sad the house of ocean-dwellers,
  If the sun shines not upon them,
  If the moonlight does not cheer them.

At the prayer of Wainamoinen, appalled by the monstrous growth, his
mother, the wind-spirit, sends a tiny water-creature, who, soon turning
into a giant, with a mighty swing of his hatchet strikes the tree. With
the second stroke he cuts it, and with the third fire springs from its
huge bulk and the oak yields, “shaking earth and heaven in falling.” It
is not till then that its beneficent powers are made manifest:—

  Eastward far the trunk extending,
  Far to westward flew the tree-tops,
  To the south the leaves were scattered,
  To the north its hundred branches.
  Whosoe’er a branch has taken
  Has obtained eternal welfare.
  Who receives himself a tree top
  He has gained the master-magic.
  Who the foliage has gathered
  Has delight that never ceases.[278]

The corresponding legend amongst the neighbouring Esthonians, as told in
their epic, the Kalevipoeg, contains a quaint medley of the practical
and the poetic. Here, too, the monstrous oak is felled by a giant who
grows from a dwarf; in falling it covers the sea with its branches and
is quickly turned to use by the people. From the trunk is fashioned a
bridge with two arms, one stretching to Finland, the other to an
adjoining island. Ships are built from the crown, and towns from the
roots, and toy-boats from the chips. What is left over is used to build
shelters for old men, widows, and orphans, and the last remainder to
provide a hut for the minstrel. Therewith he gains “the master-magic,”
for the strangers who cross the bridge now and again, and stop at his
door to ask what city and what splendid palace stand before them,
receive for answer that the palace is his poor hut, and all the
splendour around is the light of his songs reflected from heaven.[279]

To return again to the East, it has already been mentioned that in a
tradition common both to the Persians and the Hindus, and therefore
presumably of considerable antiquity, the cosmic tree produced the food
whereby the gods preserved their immortality. The universe-tree had
become a tree of life. This conception of a mystical life-giving tree
was associated with the ritual use of an earthly counterpart of the
immortalising drink.

According to the Persian tradition the haoma-tree grew beside the tree
of all seeds in a lake, where it was guarded by two fish against the
attacks of the lizard sent by Ahriman to destroy the sacred sap
wherewith the gods were nourished. It was the first of all trees planted
by Ormuzd in the fountain of life, and was identified with the god
Haoma, who gave strength and health to the body, and to the soul
enlightenment and eternal life. This god was regarded as assimilated to
the earthly haoma, and as present in it. It is related in the sacred
writings that he appeared one day to Zoroaster as he was tending the
holy fire, and thus addressed him: “I am the divine Haoma, who keeps
death at bay. Call upon me, express my juice that ye may enjoy me;
worship me with songs of praise.” Zoroaster replied, “Honour to Haoma.
He is good, well, and truly born, the giver of welfare and health,
victorious and of golden hue; his branches bow down that one may enjoy
them. To the soul he is the way to heaven. In the beginning Ormuzd gave
to Haoma the girdle glittering with stars, wherewith he girded himself
upon the tops of the mountains.”[280]

The juice of the terrestrial haoma was obtained from the plant by the
use of pestle and mortar, and was taken whenever prayer was offered.
Every house in Persia had its haoma-plant and its sacred pestle and
mortar, which had to be protected from pollution as carefully as the
holy fire and the sacred myrtle-twigs. The preparation of the
haoma-drink had its special liturgy, and in dedicating it the cup was
held aloft, not placed on the ground, lest it should be polluted by the
breath of the worshipper or other impurity.[281] The Semnion or
Theombrotion which, according to Pliny, was taken by the Persian kings
to keep off bodily decay and to produce constancy of mind, was probably
identical with the haoma-drink.[282]

The Parsees of Bombay still continue the ritual use of the haoma-juice,
deriving it from a plant with a knotted stem and leaves like those of
the jasmine, supplies of which are specially obtained from Kirman in
Persia. They refuse to admit the identity of the Vedic soma with their
own sacred plant, which they assert is never found in India.[283]

This fact, if true, would account for the confusion which appears to
exist as to the exact nature of the plant from which the Vedic soma or
amrita was derived, and indeed it is very probable that in their
migrations southward the Hindus made use successively of different
plants. But there can be little doubt that the soma ritual and the
conceptions associated with it were originally derived from the same
source as that of the haoma, and date back to a period before the Aryan
races had become separated. Like the haoma, the soma is not only a plant
but also a powerful deity, and in both the Vedas and the Zendavesta “the
conceptions of the god and the sacred juice blend wonderfully with each
other.”[284]

According to Professor Roth, the plant which is the source of the
intoxicating drink offered to the gods in Hindu sacrifices is the
_Sarcostemma acidum_ or _Asclepias acida_, a leafless herb containing a
milky juice, but it is doubtful whether it is identical with the Vedic
soma plant.[285] Dr. Haug states distinctly that the plant at present
used by the sacrificial priests of the Deccan is not the soma of the
Vedas. It grows on the hills near Poona; its sap, which is whitish, is
bitter and astringent, but not sour; it is a very nasty drink, but has
some intoxicating effect. De Gubernatis concludes that as the earthly
drink was merely a symbol of the heavenly soma, its source and character
were not material. It is not necessary that the drink which the
worshipper pretends to drink or to offer to Indra at the sacrifice
should be really intoxicating. The object of the rite is to induce Indra
in heaven to drink the water of strength, the true soma, the real
ambrosia, sometimes conceived as hidden in the clouds, sometimes as
dwelling in the soft light poured forth by the great Soma, Indu, the
moon,—the tree whose stem, long, dark, and leafless, resembles that of
the earthly plant from which the drink is ordered to be prepared. The
ritual resolves itself, according to De Gubernatis, into a sun-charm.
Soma, the moon, the god of plants, the lord of the dark forest of night
or winter, is the good genius who furnishes the miraculous drink
wherewith Indra, the solar hero, recruits his forces. It is under its
influence, say the Vedas, that Indra performs his great deeds. Soma does
really intoxicate the gods in heaven, incessantly renewing the triumph
of light over its enemies. The sacrifice of the soma on earth is only a
pale, naïve, and grotesque reproduction of that divine miracle.[286]

According to the Vedas, however, the soma-drink, which Windischman
describes as “the holiest offering of the ancient Indian worship,” had a
genuinely intoxicating effect. It is described as “stimulating speech,”
“calling forth the ardent thought,” “generating hymns with the powers of
a poet”; and is invoked as “bestower of good, master of a thousand
songs, the leader of sages.” A hymn in the Rig-Veda has been thus
translated:—

  We’ve quaffed the Soma bright
    And are immortal grown,
  We’ve entered into light
    And all the gods have known.
  What mortal now can harm
    Or foeman vex us more?
  Through thee, beyond alarm,
    Immortal god! we soar.[287]

In the Hindu worship the fermented juice of the soma-plant was presented
in ladles to the deities invoked, part sprinkled on the sacrificial
fire, part on the sacred grass strewed upon the floor, and the remainder
invariably drunk by those who conducted the ceremony.[288] In early
times, says Windischman, its use was looked upon as a holy action, and
as a sacrament by which the union with Brahma was obtained.

The _ambrosia_ of the Olympian gods, like the word itself, was no doubt
in its essence identical with the Vedic _amrita_ or _soma_. It contained
the principle of immortality, and was hence withheld from mortals. But
the word was also applied, like the soma, to a mixture of various fruits
used in religious rites.[289] A still closer analogy, however, with the
Hindu and Persian conception is to be found in the cult of Dionysus, who
was regarded as present in the wine, which was his gift to man. “He,
born a god,” says Euripides, “is poured out in libations to the
gods.”[290] And again, “This god is a prophet. For when he forces his
way into the body, he makes those who rave to foretell the future.”[291]
The fact that Dionysus was essentially a tree-god, “the spiritual form
of the vine,”[292] renders the analogy still more striking.

To discuss the genesis of the above conceptions would be to reopen the
whole question of the origin of tree-worship. The drinking of vegetable
juices, fermented or otherwise, was no doubt one of the means by which
early races were accustomed to produce dreams and visions, and so, in
their view, to get themselves possessed by or put into communication
with a spirit. It was natural, therefore, for them to assume that the
spirit in question had entered into them with the drug, and was
therefore present in it and in the plant from which it was derived. Mr.
Herbert Spencer, indeed, argues that this particular assumption was one
of the chief factors in the origin of plant-worship in general, a main
reason why plants yielding intoxicating agents, and hence other plants,
came to be regarded as containing supernatural beings.[293] It would
probably, however, be safer to conclude that the sacramental use of the
juice of plants is merely one amongst many cognate religious usages, and
like the ritual employment of wreaths in the service of the gods, the
attachment of branches to the house, and the smiting with the
“life-rood,” sprang out of the desire of men to bring nearer to
themselves a spirit already believed to exist, and thus to ensure their
enjoyment of the protection and the benefits presumed to be at his
disposal.




                              CHAPTER VII
                                PARADISE


No account of tree-worship would be complete without a chapter on that
tradition of a paradise or ideal garden of delight which is met with in
the mythology of almost all the nations of antiquity. The form of the
tradition varies. Paradise was sometimes represented (1) as the seat of
the gods; sometimes (2) as the first home of the parents of mankind; and
in other cases as (3) the abode of the spirits of the blessed.
Occasionally the different conceptions are combined; but the earlier
traditions all concur in connecting paradise with a miraculous tree or
trees, or with a more or less legendary mountain, from which it may be
plausibly inferred that they date back to the days of that primitive
cosmogony when the heavens were supposed to be upheld by a material
support. Thus in one, at least, of its aspects the tradition of paradise
must be regarded as an offshoot of the sacred tree.

It is not difficult to understand how the various conceptions arose. In
the first place, as the idea of a life or spirit more or less bound to
the tree became expanded into that of a powerful and wide-ranging god,
the idealising process demanded for him some home in heaven
corresponding to the tree which was his favourite habitat or embodiment
on earth. The sacred god-haunted tree, to which worship and gifts were
accorded below, suggested a mystical counterpart above, and the proper
home of deity was assumed to be that marvellous tree whose branches were
the sky and its fruit the sun and stars, or that lofty mountain whose
summit touched and supported the heavens.

In the second place, the belief, common in primitive mythology, that the
first parents were born from trees, presumably led to the idea that
these honoured ancestors, whose innocence was a part of their
idealisation, lived amongst trees and in a garden equally idealised.

The third conception of paradise naturally grew out of the earlier
conceptions, when there arose the belief in a future life of reward or
punishment; though it has been pointed out that the conception of heaven
under the form of a garden prevailed, _par excellence_, amongst settled
nations, living under kings of whose state a luxurious garden or
pleasaunce formed an essential part.[294]

Of paradise regarded as the abode of the gods, the Indian tradition of
the garden of Indra furnishes the best example. It was situated on Mount
Meru, on the confines of Cashmere, and contained the five wonderful
trees which sprang from the waters, after the churning of the cosmic
ocean by the gods and the demons. Under these trees the gods took their
ease, enjoying the ambrosia that fell from them. The garden, watered by
springs and rivulets, contained luminous flowers, fruits that conferred
immortality, and birds whose song even the gods loved to hear. The chief
of its five miraculous trees was the paridjata, the flower of which
preserved its freshness throughout the year, contained in itself every
scent and flavour, and gave happiness to whoever demanded it. It was,
moreover, a test of virtue, losing its splendour in the hands of the
sinful, and preserving it for him who followed duty. Each person found
in it his favourite colour and perfume. It served as a torch by night,
was a talisman against hunger, thirst, disease, and decrepitude, and
discoursed the sweetest and most varied music.[295] De Gubernatis quotes
several other instances from Indian literature of a legendary celestial
garden.[296]

[Illustration: Fig. 28.—From a Babylonian seal.(Goblet d’Alviella.)]

Of paradise, as the home of the first parents, the Pentateuch gives the
most circumstantial account, though it would appear from Genesis iii. 8
that the Biblical paradise was also regarded as a favourite resort of
Jehovah. The sacred books of the Parsis contain a very similar version.
The original human pair, Maschia and Maschiâna, sprang from a tree in
Heden, a delightful spot where grew hom or haoma, the marvellous tree of
life, whose fruit imparted vigour and immortality. The woman, at the
instance of Ahriman, the spirit of evil in the guise of a serpent, gave
her husband fruit to eat and so led to their ruin.[297] The tradition is
no doubt of very ancient origin, and is supposed to be represented on an
early Babylonian seal now in the British Museum. The tree stands in the
middle, from either side two human beings seated stretch forth their
hands for its fruit; the serpent stands erect behind one of them.[298]
On another cylinder in the Museum at the Hague there is represented a
garden with trees and birds; in the middle a palm, from which two
personages are plucking the fruit; a third with a fruit in his hand
seems to address them.[299]

The two mystical trees of the Biblical paradise find their common
counterpart in the sacred cedar of the Chaldaeans, which, besides being
essentially a tree of life, employed in magic rites to restore strength
and life to the body, was also “the revealer of the oracles of earth and
heaven.” Upon its core the name of Ea, the god of wisdom, was supposed
to be written,[300] just as the name of Ormuzd was first disclosed to
man by appearing carved in the wood of his sacred cypress. The tree of
life also finds a parallel in the divine soma, the giver of eternal
youth and immortality, a drink reserved only for the celestial gods or
the souls of the blessed.

The third conception of paradise, as the dwelling-place of the righteous
dead, is met with in the earliest Greek literature,[301] but there is no
definite trace of it amongst the Semitic nations until much later. It
did not, apparently, find recognition amongst the Jews until after the
exile, but references to it are frequent in their later apocalyptic
literature.[302] In the second book of Esdras, the Lord tells His people
that He will bring them out of the tombs, and that He has sanctified and
prepared for them “twelve trees, laden with divers fruits, and as many
fountains flowing with milk and honey, and seven mighty mountains,
whereupon there grow roses and lilies.”[303] “They shall have the tree
of life for an ointment of sweet savour; they shall neither labour nor
be weary.”[304]

In the Rabbinical writings, and still more in the Koran, this conception
of paradise is embroidered with many fanciful extravagances. The Talmud
even invents two paradises. “There is an upper paradise and a lower
paradise. And between them is fixed a pillar, by which they are joined
together, and which is called ‘The strength of the Hill of Sion.’ And by
this pillar on every Sabbath and festival the souls of the righteous
ascend from the lower to the upper paradise, and there enjoy the light
of the Divine Majesty till the end of the Sabbath or festival, when they
descend and return into the lower paradise.”[305]

This pillar is no doubt a survival of the old tradition of the
world-tree, a tradition still more obviously traceable in the Mahometan
belief. According to the Koran paradise is situated in the seventh
heaven. In the centre of it stands the marvellous tree called _Tooba_,
which is so large that a man mounted on the fleetest horse could not
ride round its branches in a hundred years. This tree not only affords
the most grateful shade over the whole extent of the Mussulman paradise,
but its boughs, laden with delicious fruits of a size and taste unknown
to mortals, bend themselves to be plucked at the wish of the happy
denizens of that blissful abode. The rivers of paradise take their rise
from the tree, flowing some with water, some with milk, and some with
honey; while others are filled with wine, the use of which is not
forbidden to the blessed.[306]

The confusion of thought apparent in these ancient traditions of
paradise was no doubt partly due to the fact that primitive man, with
his limited grasp of the possibilities of space, pictured heaven as not
far distant from him. It was a happier and a brighter earth, which
offered material rather than spiritual joys, and where, according to the
earliest conceptions, the spirits of the departed carried on the same
pursuits, reaped and sowed and hunted, as they had done while in life.
Thus the old Accadian dwellers by the Euphrates pictured the sky as the
counterpart of their own fertile plains, and the sun as a ploughman
yoking his oxen to the glittering plough, with which he tilled the
heavenly pasture.[307] The same idea is exemplified in the names of the
zodiacal constellations, which are of extremely ancient origin, the sign
we still know as Taurus being called by the Accadians “the bull who
guides the year.” So near was heaven that it was not impossible to climb
up to it, if you could but find the cosmic tree by which it was upheld.
The Khasias of India have a legend that the stars are men who have
climbed into heaven by a tree.[308] The Mbocobis of Paraguay still
believe that the souls of the dead go up “to the earth on high” by the
tree which joins us to heaven, and find an entrance by means of the
holes in the sky-roof through which the rain descends.[309] There is a
Chinese story of a king, who having heard of the glories of paradise,
set forth in search of it. After long wanderings he came to a mighty
column, which, he had been told, must be climbed in order to reach the
wished-for goal. But it was too slippery, and he was compelled to fall
back upon the alternative route, a steep and rugged mountain path. When
almost fainting with fatigue he was assisted by some friendly nymphs,
and at length arrived at a beautiful garden, with a wondrous tree in its
midst, and a fountain of immortality, from which four rivers, flowing to
the four corners of the earth, took their rise.[310]

The same notion of the similarity and propinquity of the heavenly field
is illustrated by the story of the Etruscan priest, who by his charms
brought down to earth a bit of heaven whereon to build his temple. The
Mahometans assert that the Caaba was lowered directly from the celestial
paradise exactly at the centre of the earth. And the Bedouins of Arabia
still believe that the jinni, living near the lowest heaven, can hear
the conversation of the angels, and so gain valuable information which
they are able to impart to men.[311]

Homer placed the seat of the gods and the court of Zeus upon the summit
of Olympus,[312] which was supposed to touch heaven, and piercing
through the region of rain and cloud to reach into the calm ether, where
reigned eternal spring. By later writers, however, Olympus was
represented as an unsubstantial region overhead, with the palace of Zeus
in its midst. The earlier view of Olympus exactly corresponds with the
Chaldaean “mount of the world,” the mountain of Arallu or Hades, where
the gods had their seat, and beneath which was the world of ghosts;[313]
also with the Mount of the Assembly spoken of by Isaiah, and with the
Scandinavian Asgard. But there is a clearer reminiscence of the elevated
paradise of Oriental legend in the beautiful gardens of the
world-supporting Atlas, with their delicious fruits, their golden
apples, and their protecting dragon. The third conception of paradise,
as the abode of the blessed, is also met with in Greek mythology in the
Elysian fields, or islands of the blessed, also placed by some
authorities in the neighbourhood of Mount Atlas. Here the souls of the
virtuous enjoyed perfect happiness, in bowers for ever green, and
amongst meadows watered by pleasant streams and bestarred with asphodel.
The air was pure and serene, the birds warbled in the groves, and the
inhabitants carried on such avocations as they had delighted in when on
earth. Later writers, however, substituted for these innocent pleasures
the voluptuous indulgences of the Mahometan paradise.

It was, no doubt, the ancient tradition of an elevated paradise, of a
paradise seated on the summit of a heaven-touching world-mountain, which
influenced Milton in his celebrated description, for there is nothing in
the Biblical account to suggest the excessive altitude that he so
deliberately accentuates. Paradise, according to the poet—

          crowns with her enclosure green,
  As with a rural mound, the champain head
  Of a steep wilderness, ...
              and overhead up-grew
  Insuperable height of loftiest shade,
  Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm;
              ... Yet higher than their tops
  The verdurous wall of paradise up-sprung.
  * * * * *
  And higher than that wall a circling row
  Of goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit.[314]

As man’s conceptions of God have widened with a more extended knowledge
of His universe and a fuller realisation of his own history on the
earth, these older conceptions of paradise as the home of deity and the
abode of the blessed have decayed, until at the present day, however
much our theologians may differ in their descriptions of heaven, they
agree at least in this, that whatever it is, it is not a garden. But the
belief in the existence of an earthly paradise, which formed a part of
the traditions of so many ancient nations, lingered on for centuries
after “the Holy City” of the New Testament had displaced the Paradise of
the Old.

The features of this earthly paradise are for the most part similar to
those familiar to us in the Biblical description. It contained the
fountain of immortality, from which sprang the four rivers that flowed
to the four quarters of the earth. Purling brooks ran with the far-famed
ambrosia. The dwellers therein reposed on flowery lawns, lulled by the
melodious warblings of birds and feasting on delicious fruits. Whatever
there was of beautiful or sublime in nature there found its more perfect
counterpart. Absolute contentment and serenity and the delight that
never dies were the boons it offered. There man could cease from toil,
for nature, unassisted, produced all that was necessary for his
sustenance. This garden of delight was often sought after but seldom
found, except by semi-divine heroes divinely led. Hercules, directed by
Nereus, the sea-god, succeeded in attaining the gardens of the
Hesperides on the world-supporting Mount Atlas, the Pillar of Heaven, as
Herodotus calls it. He conquered the protecting dragon and secured the
golden sun-fruit from the central tree.[315] The Chaldaean Hercules,
Gilgames, referred to in a previous chapter, found a similar tree with
magic fruit upon it when he reached the gates of ocean.

This idea of an actual paradise upon earth has fascinated the mind of
man in all ages, and has been one of his most cherished and persistent
traditions. It was an idea that no doubt arose out of and corresponded
to his lifelong craving for a perfect peace and happiness which he never
found in the world he knew, and which he has at length realised to be
incompatible with his own organisation. It has taken him centuries to
discover that if there is no earthly paradise it is he himself and not
the world that is at fault. But the tradition was slow to die, and there
are probably people who still believe, as Sir John Maundeville believed
in the fourteenth century, that the Garden of Eden exists somewhere upon
the earth if it could only be found. This is what the famous traveller
says:—

“And beyond the land, and isles, and deserts of Prester John’s lordship,
in going straight towards the East, men find nothing but mountains and
great rocks; and there is the dark region, where no man may see, neither
by day nor night, as they of the country say. And that desert, and that
place of darkness, lasts from this coast unto Terrestrial Paradise,
where Adam, our first father, and Eve were put, who dwelt there but a
little while, and that is towards the east, at the beginning of the
earth.

“Of Paradise I cannot properly speak, for I was not there. It is far
beyond; and I repent not going there, but I was not worthy. But as I
have heard say of wise men beyond, I shall tell you with good-will.
Terrestrial Paradise, as wise men say, is the highest place of the
earth; and it is so high that it nearly touches the circle of the moon,
there as the moon makes her turn. For it is so high that the flood of
Noah might not come to it, that would have covered all the earth of the
world all about, and above and beneath, except Paradise. And this
Paradise is enclosed all about with a wall, and men know not whereof it
is; for the wall is covered all over with moss, as it seems; and it
seems not that the wall is natural stone. And that wall stretches from
the south to the north; and it has but one entry, which is closed with
burning fire, so that no man that is mortal dare enter. And in the
highest place of Paradise, exactly in the middle, is a well that casts
out four streams, which run by divers lands, of which the first is
called Pison or Ganges, that runs through India or Emlak, in which river
are many precious stones, and much lignum aloës, and much sand of gold.
And the other river is called Nile or Gyson, which goes through
Ethiopia, and after through Egypt. And the other is called Tigris, which
runs by Assyria and by Armenia the Great. And the other is called
Euphrates, which runs through Media, Armenia, and Persia. And men there
beyond say that all the sweet waters of the world, above and beneath,
take their beginning from the well of Paradise; and out of that well all
waters come and go.”[316]

The paradise in the existence of which the great traveller so firmly
believed is represented in a thirteenth-century map as a circular island
lying to the east of India, and the cartographer has not forgotten to
introduce even the gate from which our first parents were expelled.

A fourteenth-century Icelandic saga describes a voyage undertaken by a
prince and his chosen friend in search of the Deathless Land. They first
went to Constantinople to consult the Emperor, and were told that the
earthly paradise was slightly to the south of India. Arrived in that
country they continued the journey on horseback, and came at last to a
dense forest, the gloom of which was so great through the interlacing of
the boughs that even by day the stars could be seen. Emerging from it
they saw, across a strait, a beautiful land, which was unmistakably
paradise. The strait was crossed by a stone bridge guarded by a dragon.
The prince, in no ways deterred, walked deliberately sword in hand
against the dragon, and the next moment, to his infinite surprise and
delight, he found himself in paradise. Here he encountered all the joys
heart could desire, and exhausted with delight he fell asleep. In his
dreams his guardian angel appeared to him and promised to lead him home,
but to come for him again and take him away for ever at the expiration
of the tenth year.[317]

Many other mediaeval stories could be quoted, in which the traveller
claims to have found paradise. It was a favourite subject with the court
minstrels, proving that even the envied dwellers around a throne are not
less open than other men to the fascinating dream of a still more
perfect happiness.

Plato’s story of the lost Atlantis, supposed to have been related to
Solon when in Egypt, also belongs to the class of paradise legends. It
was situated in the Atlantic, in the neighbourhood of the Pillars of
Hercules. Larger than Libya and Asia together, it was the seat of a
great and wonderful empire, the subjects of which, after many conquests,
set out to subdue Hellas, but were defeated by the Athenians. Shortly
afterwards there arose violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single
day and night the island disappeared beneath the sea. All this happened
9000 years before the time of Plato.[318] According to other accounts,
when the gods distributed the whole earth amongst themselves Atlantis
fell to the lot of Poseidon, and the children he had by Cleito, a
mortal, ruled over the surrounding country. The eldest, Atlas, gave his
name to the island and to the Atlantic Ocean. This sacred land brought
forth in abundance the most beautiful and delicious fruits, and
magnificent buildings were constructed from the minerals and fragrant
woods of the place, notably a holy temple dedicated to Poseidon and
Cleito, which was protected by an enclosure of gold. A wealth of
fountains and hot and cold springs supplied luxurious baths. The
government was humane and just, and the people took their due share in
it. So long as the divine nature lasted in them they were obedient to
the laws and well affected to the gods, their kinsmen, evincing
gentleness and wisdom in the various chances of life and in their
intercourse with each other, and setting more value on virtue than on
wealth and luxury. But in the end, as the divine part in them died away,
they fell from virtue, and they and their island were submerged for ever
beneath the waves.

This legend, which would appear to combine with the idea of an earthly
paradise another tradition equally familiar to antiquity, that of a
retributory deluge, survived into the Middle Ages, and became blended
with the legends of the Celtic Church. For the Atlantic paradise is
distinctly reproduced in that legendary Isle of Avalon,[319] which St.
Brandan, an Irish saint of the sixth century, was said to have found in
the course of a seven years’ voyage; the isle—

  Where falls not hail or rain or any snow,
  Nor ever wind blows loudly, but it lies
  Deep-meadowed, happy, fair, with orchard lawns
  And bowery hollows.

Columbus, in his third voyage, came upon a spot, the site of which
corresponded with the description given of the earthly paradise by “holy
and wise theologians.” But he hesitated to _ascend_ thither and assure
himself of the correctness of his conclusion, as no one could succeed in
such an undertaking without the divine permission.[320]

The Japanese have a legend of an Island of Eternal Youth, which exists
beyond the horizon in the shadowy unknown. Some fortunate observers have
from time to time seen a wondrous tree rising high above the waves. It
is the tree which has stood for all ages on the loftiest peak of Fusan,
the Mountain of Immortality. The island has the traditional
characteristics of the earthly paradise,—endless spring, airs ever
sweet, unclouded skies, unfading flowers, birds that sing of love and
joy, trees whose celestial dews carry with them the secret of eternity.
Sorrow, pain, and death are unknown, and the elect of the gods, who
people that delightful spot, fill their days with music and laughter and
song, knowing nothing of the flight of time. The miracle of the spring
in other lands is due to the whisper of the spirit of the island.[321]

This Japanese legend preserves the intimate connection between paradise
and the cosmic tree, which is often found to have dropped out of other
versions of the tradition. There can be no doubt, however, that
originally the mystical tree was the essential feature of paradise, and
the garden was merely its precinct or setting—one of the many
conceptions which grew up around the central idea of the cosmic tree.
Each nation, according to its stage of culture or its prevailing habit
of thought, emphasised one feature of it. The monster tree which,
according to primitive cosmogony, was believed to support the universe
by material branches, became in the minds of more cultivated races the
central tree of a dimly-realised paradise, and eventually the symbol of
an abstract idea. The intellectual Buddhist saw in it the emblem of
knowledge; the Persian thought of it as the tree of immortality; the
Hebrew, filled with the idea of man’s frailty and with the longing to
explain it, made it the tree of temptation.[322]

But in all these various conceptions we find a central idea, derived no
doubt from an antecedent and universal tree-worship, an idea which
places a tree at the root of all philosophy, refers all phenomena to the
existence of a central tree, serviceable to man here or hereafter, and
concentrating upon itself the reverent devotion which had outgrown its
earthly counterpart.

There are many facts to prove the importance attached in ancient times
to this conception of a glorified tree. Amongst the gorgeous decorations
of the palaces of Eastern kings a symbolical representation of the tree
of paradise was frequently found.

  Tall as the cedar of the mountain, here
  Rose the gold branches, hung with emerald leaves,
  Blossomed with pearls, and rich with ruby fruit.

Sir John Maundeville describes one which he saw in the palace of the
Chan of Cathay. “It is a vine made of fine gold, which spreads all about
the hall, and it has many clusters of grapes, some white, some green,
some yellow, some red, and some black, all of precious stones; the white
are of crystal, beryl, and iris; the yellow of topazes; the red of
rubies, grenaz, and alabraundines; the green of emeralds and perydoz and
of chrysolites; and the black of onyx and garnets. And they are all so
properly made that it appears a real vine, bearing natural grapes.”[323]

According to an Arab writer, quoted by Gibbon,[324] there existed in the
magnificent palace of the Caliph of Bagdad, in 917 A.D., amongst other
spectacles of rare and stupendous luxury, a tree of gold and silver,
spreading into eighteen large branches, on which and on the lesser
boughs sat a variety of birds made of the same precious metals. While
the machinery effected spontaneous motions the several birds warbled
their natural harmony. The intention was, no doubt, to represent the
traditional luxuriance of paradise, and a similar motive is met with in
Eastern design even in the present day.

The tradition of a king who built a false paradise, like Sheddad in
Southey’s _Thalaba_, seems always to have been current in Western Asia.
There is in the British Museum a sculpture from Koyunjik representing a
palace, or may be a temple, constructed in imitation of a paradise. The
artificial hill, representing the world-mountain on which it stands, is
planted with trees and flowers, and watered by a stream that issues from
a hanging garden.




                              CHAPTER VIII
                            MAY CELEBRATIONS


In these days, when so much is done to equalise the seasons, when in the
flower-shops spring treads on the heels of autumn, and Christmas windows
are gay with tropical fruits, when fresh meat is always on the stalls,
and the earth is tapped of its light and warmth to make up for the
absent sun, it is difficult to realise the delight and enthusiasm with
which our forefathers welcomed the yearly miracle of the spring. It
meant so much to them,—release from the cold and the darkness that fell
hardly on all but the rich; a feast of colour to eyes weary of winter
grays; luscious, varied, and plentiful food to palates dulled by salt
meat and pease-pudding. No wonder that the first hint of the sun’s
return at Christmas, and the fulfilment of the promise of spring at
May-day, were welcomed with an abandonment of joy to which our modern
festivals offer but a pale parallel. It is doubtful, however, whether,
even in the far-off days when the ceremonies possessed the highest
religious sanction and significance, they were celebrated with a finer
exuberance than in the comparatively recent times when this country was
still “merrie England.” Fetching in the May or going a-Maying was then a
most important festival, in which people of all ranks took part. Henry
VIII. himself rode a-Maying with Queen Katharine and his Court. Every
village had its May-pole, and the first of May was everywhere “the
maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year.” The celebration was
recognised by the Roman Church, the note for the 30th of April in an old
Calendar being, “The boys go out and seek May-trees.”[325] Chaucer
represents the whole Court as going into the fields “on May-day when the
lark begins to rise”—

  To fetch the floures fresh and branch and blome.
  And namely hawthorne brought both page and grome,
  With freshë garlants party blew and white,
  And than rejoysen in their great delight.[326]

The poet makes the whole Court pelt each other with flowers, “the
primerose, the violete and the gold,” but the general custom was to
bring home the branches and flowers as an adornment for the house. Even
the barns and the cow-byres were carefully decorated, long after the
primitive intention of the ceremony had been forgotten, and it had
degenerated into a licensed opportunity for revelry and love-making.

The two aspects of the celebration, the decorative and the amatory, are
charmingly illustrated in this lyric of Herrick’s:—

  Come, my Corinna, come; and coming mark
  How each field turns a street, each street a park,
      Made green and trimmed with trees: see how
      Devotion gives each house a bough
      Or branch: each porch, each door ere this
      An ark, a tabernacle is,
  Made up of white-thorn neatly interwove,
  As if here were those cooler shades of love.
      Can such delights be in the street
      And open fields and we not see’t?
      Come, we’ll abroad; and let’s obey
      The proclamation made for May:
  And sin no more, as we have done by staying;
  But, my Corinna, come, let’s go a-Maying.

The lover of old customs owes little to the Puritans, for they did their
best to root them out, but he is certainly indebted to them incidentally
for some valuable evidence as to those same customs, not otherwise
attainable. Stubbs, a Puritan writer of the time of Elizabeth, thus
describes the setting up of the Maypole in his time:—“But their cheefest
jewell they bring from thence (the woods) in their Maie Poole, whiche
they bring home with greate veneration as thus: They have twentie or
fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe havyng a sweete nosegaie of flowers tyed
on the tippe of his hornes, and these oxen drawe home this Maie poole
(this stinckyng idoll rather) which is covered all over with flowers and
hearbes, bounde rounde aboute with stringes, from top to bottome, and
sometimes painted with variable colours, with twoo or three hundred men,
women, and children followyng it with greate devotion. And thus beyng
reared up with handkercheifes and flagges streamyng on the toppe, they
strawe the grounde aboute, binde greene boughes about it, sett up
sommer-haules, bowers, and arbours hard by it. And then fall they to
banquet and feast, to leape and daunce aboute it, as the Heathen people
did at the dedication of their idolles, whereof this is a perfect
patterne, or rather the thyng itself.”[327]

“What adoe make our yong men at the time of May?” cries another Puritan
writer. “Do they not use night-watchings to rob and steale young trees
out of other men’s grounde, and bring them home into their parishe, with
minstrels playing before: and when they have set it up they will decke
it with floures and garlands and daunce rounde (men and women togither,
moste unseemley and intolerable, as I have proved before) about the
tree, like unto the children of Israell that daunced about the golden
calfe that they had set up.”[328]

Thomas Hall, another author of the same class, was also moved to
eloquence on the subject: “Had this rudeness been acted only in some
ignorant and obscure parts of the land I had been silent; but when I
perceived that the complaints were general from all parts of the land,
and that even in Cheapside itself the rude rabble had set up this ensign
of profaneness, and had put the Lord Mayor to the trouble of seeing it
pulled down, I could not, out of my dearest respects and tender
compassion to the land of my nativity, and for the prevention of like
disorders (if possible) for the future, but put pen to paper, and
discover the sinful use and vile profaneness that attend such
misrule.”[329]

As every one knows, the Puritans had their will of the May-poles, and
the Long Parliament in April 1644 decreed their removal as “a heathenish
vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickednesse.” They were
indeed reinstated after the Restoration and the old festivities revived,
but the Puritan epoch had left its mark upon the spirit of the people,
and May-day was never again quite what it had been, so that the
following lament by a writer of Cromwell’s time was not quite out of
date even when King Charles had again come to his own:—

  Happy the age and harmlesse were the dayes
  (For then true love and amity was found)
  When every village did a May-pole raise,
  And Whitsun-ales and May-games did abound,
  And all the lusty yonkers in a rout
  With merry lasses daunc’d the rod about.
  Then Friendship to their banquets bid the guests
  And poor men far’d the better for their feasts.
  * * * * *
  But since the Summer poles were overthrown,
  And all good sports and merriments decayed,
  How times and men are chang’d so well is knowne,
  It were but labour lost if more were said.

In England the once universal joy-making on the first of May has
dwindled into a mere eleemosynary device, and every year takes away
something even from this poor survival. We are only reminded of the day
in London by here and there a peripatetic Jack-in-the-Green with his
retinue of begging clowns, by the gay ribbons on a few draught horses,
and by the newspaper reports of the election of Mr. Ruskin’s May-queen
at Whitelands College. But in many old-world towns and villages
throughout the country the children still carry round wands, with
bunches of flowers tied to them, or garlands, consisting of a little
bower fashioned out of two crossed hoops, hidden in flowers, with a doll
seated in the centre. The obvious intention of this pretty custom is the
collection of coppers, which no one will grudge. It is, so to say, a
religious ceremony, whereof only the collection has survived, as the
following old rhyme sufficiently illustrates:—

  Gentlemen and ladies!
  We wish you happy May;
  We’ve come to show our garlands,
  Because it is May-day;
  Come, kiss my face, and smell my mace,
  And give the lord and lady something.[330]

In place of the final couplet it was sometimes the custom of one of the
bearers to say, “Please to handsel the lord and lady’s purse.”

The practice once current in the North of England of going into the
woods on the first of May, “when the day begins to break,” and bringing
home “knots of flowers and buds and garlands gay” wherewith to adorn the
windows and doors of the houses at sunrise, is illustrated in the
following doggrel, which used to be sung in the streets of
Newcastle-on-Tyne:[331]—

  Rise up, maidens, fie for shame!
  For I’ve been four long miles from hame;
  I’ve been gathering my garland gay,
  Rise up, fair maids, and take in your May.

It now remains to trace back these ceremonies—these survivals—to their
origin, and to show how once they were the essential outcome of a living
creed, and had a serious, and, so to speak, sacramental
significance.[332] The May-day celebrations combined three different
usages. _First_, the bringing in of the May and the decoration of the
homestead. _Secondly_, the planting of the May-pole and the dancing
around it. _Thirdly_, the selection of some youth or maiden as King or
Queen of the May.

(1) The custom of going to the woods to fetch in the May is not by any
means peculiar to England. It was until recently very general throughout
Europe, and still survives in many districts, though sometimes
Whitsuntide or Midsummer is the date chosen for the ceremony. This wide
distribution at once stamps it as an ancient observance, and indeed it
was already represented as such so long ago as the thirteenth
century.[333] In some districts the branches that were brought in were
fastened over the house door or upon the roof, or planted in front of
the cattle stalls, a separate bush being attached for each head of
cattle. Here the acknowledged purpose was to make the cows good milkers.
“They fancy,” says a writer on the manners of the Irish, “that a green
bough fastened on May-day against the house will produce plenty of milk
that summer.”[334] In other districts the May-bushes were decorated with
nosegays and ribbons and carried in solemn procession from house to
house, the bearers singing a song and collecting their recompense in a
basket. In some parts of Sweden on May-day eve boys still go round at
the heels of the village fiddler, each with a bunch of freshly-gathered
birch-twigs, singing songs in which fine weather, good harvests, and
other blessings are entreated. At every cottage where they are duly
compensated for their pains they adorn the door with one of their
birch-sprays. In Stockholm on St. John’s eve miniature May-poles, known
as Majstänger, are sold by the thousand.[335] In Russia the custom of
decking the houses with branches at Whitsuntide is universal.[336]
Similar instances might be multiplied indefinitely.

Much light has been thrown on these May-day ceremonies by the study of
many cognate observances met with amongst different nations and at
different periods. In Western Germany and over the greater part of
France it is customary at harvest-time to select a green sapling or
branch, adorn it with flowers, ribbons, and coloured paper, and hang it
with harvest fruits, eggs, cakes, and sweetmeats, and sometimes even
with sausages, rolls of tobacco, rings, needles, etc. Often bottles of
wine or beer are also suspended to it. It is known as the May,
harvest-May, _bouquet de la moisson_, and it is frequently set up in the
field which is in process of cutting. When the reaping is over it is
brought home on the last sheaf or on the last load, or is borne by a
harvestman seated on the waggon or walking before it. On its arrival at
the homestead it is solemnly welcomed by the farmer, and attached to
some conspicuous spot on the barn or house. Here it remains for a year
until replaced by its successor. Another feature of the ceremony, which
is no doubt of the nature of a rain charm, consists in the drenching of
the May and its bearers with water, or in the sprinkling of them with
wine. A variant of this observance is met with in other parts of Europe,
where at some date after harvest the farmer causes a lofty pole, dressed
with ribbons and hung with handkerchiefs, articles of clothing, cakes,
fruit, etc., to be erected in his field. The labourers then climb or
race for the prizes.[337]

There can be no question as to the antiquity of these customs.
Mannhardt, who has carefully studied the subject, finds a most
remarkable similarity between the harvest festivals of ancient Greece
and those of modern Europe. The _eiresione_ or harvest-bush of the
Greeks, which is reproduced “with almost photographic exactness” in the
harvest-May above described,[338] was a branch of olive or laurel, bound
with red and white wool, and hung with ribbons, the finest
harvest-fruits, cakes, and jars of honey, oil, and wine. It was carried
in solemn procession with choral songs, at the Thargelia or feast of
first-fruits in the late spring, and at the Pyanepsia or true
harvest-festival in the early autumn, its destination at the former
festival being the temple of Athena Polias, at the latter that of
Apollo. It was planted before the door of the temple, the contents of
the jars attached to it were poured over it, and the following lines
were sung: “_Eiresione_ brings figs and plump loaves, and honey in jars,
and oil wherewith to anoint yourself, and cups of wine unwatered, that
you may drink yourself to sleep.”[339] In addition to this official
ceremony each landowner who grew corn and fruit held his own festival,
the _eiresione_ in that case being suspended or fastened before his
house-door, or placed inside the house beside the ancestral images.
There it remained for a twelve-month, until on the bringing home of the
next year’s branch it was taken down and burnt. It was to this private
_eiresione_ that the familiar passages in Aristophanes allude. Demos
hearing a noise at his front door, jumps to the conclusion that a street
brawl is imminent: “Who’s making that hullaballoo?” he cries; “away from
my door. What, will ye tear down my _eiresione_?”[340] His dread is that
his harvest-branch will be requisitioned as a weapon of offence, a
possible application of it also alluded to by the poet in another
passage.[341] Elsewhere it is jestingly said of a dried-up old woman,
that if a spark fell on her, she would burn up like an old
_eiresione_,[342] a comparison which throws light on the mode of
disposing of the last year’s branch.

The _Oschophoria_, or carrying in procession of the _oschos_, a
vine-branch with the ripe grapes upon it, was another of the Athenian
harvest festivals, and is interesting in the present connection from its
being associated, like some modern harvest observances, with a racing
competition.

These festivals, which were probably of prehistoric origin, were in
classical times sanctified for the popular mind by being linked with and
accounted for by some legendary event which appealed to the patriotic
sentiment. But in spite of this they would appear in course of time to
have undergone something of the same debasement as our own May
observances, and degenerated into a begging procession from door to
door. At any rate the word _eiresione_, originally applied to the
festival hymn as well as to the branch, became in later times the
general name for all begging-songs. Initially, however, the _eiresione_
was, no doubt, a symbolical representation of the genius of vegetation,
and as such was addressed as a person.[343]

Traced to its remote origin, there can be little doubt that the ceremony
of bringing in the May arose from a similar process of reasoning. The
gods or spirits of those far-off times had their habitation, or at least
manifested their activity, in the tree. The gifts of rain and sunshine
were in their hands. They made the crops to grow, the herds to multiply,
and women to give increase. According to Aeneas Sylvius, the Lithuanians
believed that their sacred groves were the house of the god who gave
them rain and sunshine.[344] In Circassia the pear-tree is still
regarded as the protector of cattle, and in the autumn is cut down,
carried home, and worshipped as a god.[345] In many countries trees are
held to have the power of helping women in childbirth.[346] It was
therefore no more unnatural for an ignorant peasantry to believe that
the same power and influence existed in the cut branches of trees than
it is for a modern uncultured Catholic to expect help from sacred
relics. In each case the process of thought is the same. Eventually the
ceremony of carrying the branch round the village, the primitive purpose
of which was to make each house a sharer in the benevolent offices of
the tree-spirit, degenerated into a meaningless observance, a pretext
for indulging in festivities and levying contributions. But there can be
no doubt that the securing of fertility and abundance, together with the
supply of rain and sunshine necessary thereto, was originally the
root-idea of the worldwide spring observances.

(2) The custom of setting up the May-pole on the village green had, no
doubt, a similar genesis. It represented for the community what the
May-day decoration of the house represented for the family. In parts of
Europe the pole is sometimes planted in front of the Mayor’s or
Burgomaster’s house.[347] The intention, evidently, was to bring to the
village as a whole the newly-quickened generative spirit resident in the
woods. The custom of cutting down a tree, decorating it with garlands
and ribbons, re-erecting it, and fêting it with dance and song, has
prevailed in almost every country in the world. In some instances it is
further dressed as a mortal, or a human image is attached to it, as in
the Attis rites, testifying to the anthropomorphic conception of the
tree-spirit. The doll placed in the centre of the children’s May
garlands would seem to be a survival of this custom. The same feature of
the celebration is illustrated most clearly in the Greek festival of the
little Daedala, which may be regarded as “a classical equivalent of an
English May-day in the olden time.”[348] The festival was inaugurated in
an ancient oak-forest. Cooked meat was placed upon the ground and the
movements of the birds which came to feed upon it were carefully
observed. The tree upon which a bird was first observed to alight with
the meat in its bill was cut down, carved into the image of a woman, and
dressed as a bride. It was then placed upon a cart and drawn in
procession with singing and dancing. It must be added that Mr. Farnell
regards this festival as a survival from prehistoric times of the
processional ceremony of the “sacred marriage” between Zeus and Hera,
which may possibly have been symbolical of the marriage of earth and
heaven in spring.[349]

In the case of our own May-pole, it was originally, no doubt, the custom
to erect a fresh tree every year, in order that the newly-awakened
energy of the forest might be communicated to the village, and in many
parts this feature of the custom appears to have survived, as we may
gather from the Puritan accounts above quoted. Elsewhere, as the
intention of the ceremony was lost sight of, a permanent May-pole was
substituted for the annual tree, and was converted on May-day, by means
of garlands and flowers, into the semblance of a living growth. The
May-tree of the German village, for instance, is a permanent
construction, made up of several tall trunks.[350] On May-day, cakes,
sausages, eggs, and other desirable things are hung upon it, the
villagers dance around it, and the young men climb it to secured its
gifts. In some parts the May-pole is surmounted by a cross, and the
symbol of a dead faith is consecrated by that of a living one.

Yet the old faith long left its traces in several quaint observances.
Amongst the Wends of the Elbe the cattle were driven every year round
the village tree. The bride imported from another village must dance
around it and pay it her footing. The wounded villager also gave it
money and got himself healed by rubbing himself against it.[351] Such
usages are only intelligible on the theory that the tree was once
seriously believed to be the local habitation of a spirit, who
concentrated in himself the marvellous fruitfulness and healing
beneficence of nature.

The custom so often met with on the Continent[352] of attaching a young
sapling or a branch to the roof of a house newly built, or in process of
erection, is another survival, descended, no doubt, from the ancient
belief in the benign influence of the tree-inhabiting spirit. In some
places it is usual to decorate the bough with flowers, ribbons, and
strings of eggs, which last are clearly intended to symbolise the
life-giving power assumed to be the spirit’s special attribute.

(3) But the conception which underlay and actuated the May celebrations
is illustrated still more clearly by their third feature—the choice of a
youth or maiden, or both, to personify the reawakened and rejoicing
nature. A great deal of evidence on this subject has been collected by
Mannhardt and Frazer, which can only be briefly summarised here. In the
case of the begging processions with May-trees or May-boughs from door
to door, it was once really believed that the good genius of growth was
present unseen in the bough. But often he was represented in addition by
a man dressed in green leaves and flowers, or by a girl similarly
adorned, who being looked upon as an actual representative of the spirit
of vegetation, was supposed to produce the same beneficial effects on
the fowls, the fruit-trees, and the crops as the presence of the deity
himself. “The names May, Father May, May Lady, Queen of the May, by
which the anthropomorphic spirit of vegetation is often denoted, show
that the conception of the spirit of vegetation is blent with a
personification of the season at which his powers are most strikingly
manifested.”[353]

In some cases the human representative of the tree-spirit goes hand in
hand with his vegetable representative, the tree or branch. The former
may be merely a doll or puppet, as in the Lady of the May of our own May
garlands, or it may be a chosen youth or girl, who carries a miniature
May-tree, or is throned beside the May-pole, or dances around it, clad
in leafy garments. Sometimes the chief actor in the ceremony is ducked
in a pond or drenched with water, or, as is still the case in some parts
of Ireland, carries a pail of water and a mop to distribute its
contents, with the idea of ensuring rain by a sort of sympathetic magic.
In other cases the tree disappears from the celebration, and the whole
burden of representing its indwelling spirit falls upon its human
substitute, who in such event is almost always swathed in leaves or
flowers. The Green George of Carinthia[354] and our own
Jack-in-the-Green are instances of this custom. The pence collected no
doubt represent what was once a willing contribution for services
presumably useful and worthy of reward.

The custom of electing a King or Queen of the May is very general
throughout Europe.[355] The original purpose was, no doubt, to personify
the regal character of the spirit who ruled the woods, but in other
cases the representative is termed a Bridegroom or Bride, emphasising
another attribute of the deity. In England the crowning of the May-queen
closed the long day’s ceremonies, and the young people who had been up
before sunrise to bring in the May, and had danced all day upon the
village green, ended their pleasant labours at sundown with this
graceful observance.

In some instances _two_ representatives of the spirit of vegetation were
chosen, under the names of King and Queen, or Prince and Princess, or
Lord and Lady. The King and Queen are mentioned in an English document
of the thirteenth century, and there is evidence to show that Robin Hood
and Maid Marian were originally representatives of the vegetation
spirit, for the former is spoken of in an old book of 1576 as King of
the May, while Marian or May-Marian, as she was sometimes called, was
certainly a Queen of May, and as such was represented wearing a golden
crown and carrying in her hand a red pink, the emblem of summer.[356]

At the time when we first encounter them in history these celebrations
had already lost their religious significance and passed into graceful
observances, the excuse for innocent mirth. But if we trace them back
into the gloom in which they arose we come upon evidence which seems to
show that they were not always so innocent. It is quite probable that in
very early times the human representative of the spirit of vegetation
was actually sacrificed, in order that the divine spirit incarnate in
him might be transferred in unabated vigour to his successor,[357] just
as the old May-pole was destroyed and a new one set up in its place.
Herein was typified the annual death and resurrection of the spirit of
vegetation, a conception which has given rise to many celebrations, not
always free from bloodshed, in different parts of the world. The rites
by which in Egypt and Western Asia the death and resurrection of Osiris,
Adonis, Tammuz, Attis, and Dionysus were solemnised find their parallels
not only in the barbarous usages once current in Mexico, but also in
certain spring and summer celebrations of the peasants of Europe.

The Mexican god of the plant-world was Huitzilopochtli, and at the feast
of Teteionan, mother of the gods, a woman clothed as the goddess was
sacrificed, her head cut off, and her skin used to dress a youth, who
was then taken to the god’s temple, accompanied by a large crowd of
worshippers.[358] That is to say, the old embodiment of plant life was
killed, and its personality, typified by the skin, was given to a
youthful successor, who, doubtless, was sacrificed in his turn when it
was considered necessary for the health of the plant-world.

In some modern European spring observances the actual putting to death
of the spirit of vegetation survives in symbol. “In Lower Bavaria, the
Whitsuntide representative of the tree-spirit—the Pfingstl, as he is
called—was clad from top to toe in leaves and flowers. On his head he
wore a high pointed cap, the ends of which rested on his shoulders, only
two holes being left for his eyes. The cap was covered with
water-flowers and surmounted with a nosegay of peonies. The sleeves of
his coat were also made of water-plants, and the rest of his body was
enveloped in alder and hazel leaves. On each side of him marched a boy,
holding up one of the Pfingstl’s arms. These two boys carried drawn
swords, and so did most of the others who formed the procession. They
stopped at every house where they hoped to receive a present, and the
people in hiding soused the leaf-clad boy with water. All rejoiced when
he was well drenched. Finally he waded into the brook up to his middle,
whereupon one of the boys, standing on the bridge, pretended to cut off
his head.”[359]

“At Wurmlingen in Swabia a score of young fellows dress themselves on
Whit-Monday in white shirts and white trousers with red scarves round
their waists, and swords hanging from the scarves. They ride on
horseback into the wood, led by two trumpeters blowing their trumpets.
In the wood they cut down leafy oak branches, in which they envelope
from head to foot him who was the last of their number to ride out of
the village. His legs, however, are encased separately, so that he may
be able to mount his horse again. Further, they give him a long
artificial neck, with an artificial head and a false face on the top of
it. Then a May-tree is cut, generally an aspen or beech about ten feet
high; and being decked with coloured handkerchiefs and ribbons, it is
entrusted to a special ‘May-bearer.’ The cavalcade then returns, with
music and song, to the village. Amongst the personages who figure in the
procession are a Moorish king with a sooty face and crown on his head, a
Dr. Iron-Beard, a corporal, and an executioner. They halt on the village
green, and each of the characters makes a speech in rhyme. The
executioner announces that the leaf-clad man has been condemned to
death, and cuts off his false head. Then the riders race to the
May-tree, which has been set up a little way off. The first man who
succeeds in wrenching it from the ground as he gallops past keeps it
with all its decorations. The ceremony is observed every second or third
year.”[360]

In Saxony and Thuringia, at Whitsuntide, the Wild Man, a person
disguised in branches and moss, was chased through the woods. On being
overtaken he was shot at with blank cartridge and pretended to fall down
dead. A mock doctor then bled him and he soon came to life again. The
rejoicing people placed him in a waggon, and led him about in
procession, to receive gifts at the houses of the village.[361]

The common feature in all these apparently senseless observances is the
symbolical sacrifice of the human representative of the spirit of
vegetation, and they drive us to the conclusion that there was a time
when the victim was sacrificed in reality. In the same way the custom
still current in Belgium and French Flanders at the summer festival of
drawing in procession large wicker figures enclosing living men, recalls
the gigantic images of ozier-work, covered with leaves, in which the
Druids confined the victims destined for their fiery sacrifices.[362]




                               CHAPTER IX
                         CHRISTMAS OBSERVANCES


In modern times, as the once joyful celebrations of May-day have waned
the festivities of Christmas-tide have undergone increase and
development. The grosser features of the festival have, no doubt, been
eliminated; the mummers and the lord of misrule have for the most part
gone the way of the May-king, but all the more graceful and orderly
observances of the time have strengthened their hold on the popular
favour. The decoration of the house is as usual to-day at Christmas as
it once was at May-day, and the Christmas-tree has stepped into the
place which the May-tree once held in the affections of the young. Yet
if we trace these Christmas observances back to their origin, we find
them as distinctively pagan in their ancestry as the festivities of
May-day.

We owe the survival of many pagan customs largely to the Roman Church,
whose settled policy it was to adapt the old festal rites to the
purposes of the new faith, and to divert its rude converts from the
riotous festivities of their unconverted friends by offering them the
more orderly rejoicings of a Christian holy day. Gregory the Great, when
he sent his missionaries to Britain, instructed them to Christianise the
festivals and temples of the heathen, “raising their stubborn minds
upwards not by leaps, but step by step.” And Dr. Tille, in his learned
work on the German Christmas,[363] has shown what pains were taken by
the priesthood to transfer to their own feast the rude rejoicings with
which the unconverted Germans celebrated their great festival at the
beginning of winter. The same transference of pre-Christian usages
occurred in Italy, where the Christmas festival, first definitely fixed
at the time of the winter solstice by Bishop Liberius, A.D. 354,[364]
inherited, as expressly stated by Polydore Virgil, several of the
features of the great Roman festival of the Saturnalia, held about the
same time. This festival was an occasion for universal mirth and
festivity. Friends visited and feasted each other, and there was a
general interchange of presents, the objects presented consisting
usually of branches, wax tapers, and clay dolls. The stalls were laden
with gifts, like the Christmas shops of to-day. One of the days of the
festival, the _dies juvenalis_, was devoted to children. The solstitial
character of the festival is shown by the fact that another of its days
was dedicated by the Emperor Aurelian to the Persian sun-god, Mithra;
and Varro states that the clay dolls, which were an important feature of
the celebration, represented the infant sacrifices once made to a
Phoenician Baal who had been introduced to Rome under the name of Saturn
or Cronos.[365]

However this may be, it is clear that some observances familiar to us at
Christmas—the feasting, the present giving, and the now obsolete
mumming—have an origin which is lost in antiquity. Other customs, too,
though with a different _provenance_, have an equally venerable
ancestry. The use of mistletoe, for instance, is without doubt a direct
legacy from the Druids, who were wont at the time of the solstices
solemnly to place upon their altars the mysterious branch, into which it
was thought that the spirit of the tree retreated when the rest of the
leaves had fallen. This practice, strangely enough, survived until
within comparatively recent years in a ceremonial practised at York
Minster and some other northern churches,[366] though as a rule the
introduction of the mistletoe into Christian edifices was strongly
reprobated, on the score that it was a heathen emblem.

The practice of decorating the house at the New Year with holly and
other evergreens was also a pagan observance. Dr. Chandler refers to it
as a Druidic custom, the intention being to provide the sylvan spirits
with a shelter to which they might repair, “and remain unnipped with
frost and cold winds, until a milder season had renewed the foliage of
their darling abodes.”[367] In early times the Church made a stand
against this use of evergreens as being a pagan custom, but the
interdict was not persevered in, and later on we find the decoration of
the churches a recognised practice, the note for Christmas eve in the
old Calendar being, _Templa exornantur_.[368]

The observance, however, which most concerns us here is that of the
Christmas-tree, the evolution of which furnishes us with one of the most
interesting chapters in the history of religious development. To the
present generation the Christmas-tree appears such an essential feature
of the festival, as celebrated in this country, that many will be
surprised to hear how recent an importation it is. But as a matter of
fact, the Christmas-tree was practically unknown in England until it was
introduced by the late Prince Consort.[369] Even in Germany, the land of
its origin, it was not universally established as an integral part of
the festival until the beginning of the present century,[370] and it was
only at that date that it came to be known as the “Weihnachtsbaum” and
“Christbaum.”[371] Goethe in 1774 describes it as adorned with wax
tapers, sweetmeats, and apples, but calls it simply the “decorated
tree.”[372] Schiller in 1789 finds no more distinctive name for it than
the “green tree.”[373] Since that time, or rather since 1830, its
diffusion throughout the world has been so marvellously rapid that there
is nothing to compare with it in the whole history of popular customs.

In Germany the Christmas-tree can be traced back more or less in its
present form to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when an
unnamed writer, in some extremely fragmentary notes, tells us that it
was the custom at Strasburg to set up fir-trees in the houses at
Christmas, and to deck them with roses of coloured paper, apples,
etc.[374] The next mention of it occurs half a century later in the
writings of Professor Dannhauer, a celebrated theologian, also living in
Strasburg.[375] “Amongst the other absurdities,” he writes, “with which
men are often more busied at Christmas than with the Word of God, there
is also the Christmas or fir-tree, which they erect in their houses,
hang it with dolls and sweetmeats, and then shake it and cause it to
shed its flowers. I know not the origin of the custom, it is a child’s
game.... Far better were it to lead the children to the spiritual cedar,
Christ Jesus.” The reprobation of the Strasburg preacher was echoed by
other divines, and to this cause probably the Christmas-tree owed its
slow diffusion throughout Germany. The theological dislike of it,
however, as it turned out, was ill-advised, for eventually the
Christmas-tree displaced other popular observances of a far less
innocent nature.

So far we have been treading historical ground, but in tracing the
Christmas-tree still farther back we have only inference to go upon. The
subject, however, has been carefully worked out by Dr. Tille,[376] and
the pedigree which he traces for the tree is a most interesting one. His
argument must here be condensed as closely as possible. The
Christmas-tree, with its lights, its artificial flowers, and its apples
and other fruit, is presumably connected with the legend of Christmas
flowering trees, which was very familiar to the Middle Ages, and of
which the English myth of the Glastonbury thorn is an example. The
origin of the legend in Germany is thus explained by Dr. Tille:—It is
not unusual when the season is mild to find trees blossoming in
November, especially the cherry and the crab-tree. For the old German
peasant the New Year began with the great slaughtering feast early in
November, when the cattle were brought in from the pastures, and all the
superfluous ones were butchered and feasted on; the winter was thus
counted to the New Year, like the eve to a holy day. Hence when trees
blossomed late, a casual connection was inevitably traced between the
strange phenomenon and the New Year feast at which it took place. On the
introduction of Christianity the feasts of St. Martin, St. Andrew, and
St. Nicholas were substituted for the ancient festivals. The strange
blossoming power of nature was connected with St. Andrew’s Day, and
fruit-boughs severed on that day were believed by the people to possess
particular virtue.[377] The Mediaeval Church, always eager to enlist
popular superstitions in its own support, set itself to transfer to
Christmas the blossoming tree of the November festival, and the legends
which related how celebrated magicians like Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus,
and Faustus had made for themselves a summer in the heart of winter were
incorporated by the monks into the lives of certain saints.[378] The
belief in trees that blossomed and bore fruit at Christmas was widely
distributed and firmly held amongst the people in the later Middle Ages.
In the German literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many
instances of the miraculous fact are circumstantially recorded.[379] A
writer in 1430 relates that “not far from Nuremburg there stood a
wonderful tree. Every year, in the coldest season, on the night of
Christ’s birth this tree put forth blossoms and apples as thick as a
man’s thumb. This in the midst of deep snow and in the teeth of cold
winds.” In a MS. letter of the Bishop of Bamberg, dated 1426, and
preserved in the Hofbibliothek at Vienna, the actual blossoming of two
apple-trees at Christmas is mentioned as an acknowledged fact, and we
find a Protestant preacher giving full credence to the belief nearly a
couple of centuries later.

But the most striking instance of the hold which such legends had taken
on the popular mind is to be found in connection with our own miraculous
tree, the Glastonbury Thorn—

                            The winter thorn
  Which blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.

This tree, which was the object of such veneration in the later Middle
Ages that the merchants of Bristol are said to have found the export of
its blossoms extremely remunerative, stood upon an eminence near the
town of Glastonbury. The legend ran that Joseph of Arimathea, who,
according to monkish teaching, was the first Christian missionary to
this country, one Christmas eve planted his staff in the ground. The
staff, which years previously had been cut from a hawthorn-tree, at once
took root and put forth leaves, and by the next day was in full blossom.
The miracle was repeated on every subsequent Christmas-day. Even after
the Reformation we find King James I. and his queen and other persons of
quality giving large sums for cuttings from the tree, which were
believed to have the same miraculous virtue as the parent thorn, and
even in the following reign it was customary to carry a branch of the
tree in procession and present it to the king. In the Civil War the
original tree was destroyed, but some of its off-shoots survived, one
especially at Quainton in Buckinghamshire, which suddenly sprang into
fame again when the new style was introduced into the Calendar in 1752,
and the people, resenting the loss of their eleven days, appealed from
the decision of their rulers to the higher wisdom of the miraculous
tree. According to the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1753, about two
thousand people on the night of 24th December 1752 came with lanthorns
and candles to view the thorn-tree, “which was remembered (this year
only) to be a slip from the Glastonbury thorn.” As the tree remained
bare the people agreed that 25th December, N.S., could not be the true
Christmas-day, and refused to celebrate it as such. Their excitement was
intensified when on 5th January the tree was found to be in full bloom,
and to pacify them the authorities were driven to decree that the old
Christmas-day should be celebrated as well as the new. It may be added
that two thorn-trees still exist near the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey,
which blossom during the winter, and are identified by Loudoun with a
variety of hawthorn, the _Crataegus oxyacantha praecox_, which is
admittedly a winter flowerer.[380]

There is, however, as Mannhardt points out,[381] another way in which a
fruit-bearing tree became popularly associated with Christmas. The
ancient Church had devoted the day before Christmas-day to the memory of
Adam and Eve, and it was customary at Christmas in many parts of the
Continent to give a dramatic representation of the story of the Creation
and Fall in connection with the drama of the Nativity. Hence arose the
Paradise-plays which were familiar to the Middle Ages from the
thirteenth century onward. The well-known legend that the cross of
Christ was fashioned from a tree which had sprung from a slip of the
Tree of Knowledge served as a link between the events celebrated so
closely together, the Fall and the Birth of the Redeemer, and gave
additional significance to the scenery of the Paradise-play, consisting,
as it usually did, of trees, or sometimes of a single tree, laden with
apples and decked with ribbons. In some cases the tree was carried on to
the stage by one of the actors. In this way the apple-bearing tree
became the recognised scenic symbol of Christmas, and naturally
connected itself with, if it did not spring out of, the very early
legend of the Church that all nature blossomed at the birth of Christ,
who Himself, according to the fanciful symbolism of the time, was the
very Tree of Life which had once stood in paradise.

Another popular custom, which dates back to the time when the belief in
the beneficent power of sylvan deities was general, is also probably
entitled to a place in the pedigree of the Christmas-tree. It was
customary amongst the ancient Germans on one of the sacred nights of the
winter festival, when, according to the popular belief, nature was
permeated with new life, to cut wands from the hedges.[382] These were
brought home, put in water or planted in a pot of moist earth, and
solemnly placed, some in the open air, some in the stable, and some in
the house. A month later each wand would be in full bloom, and it was
then the custom to carry it round and lightly strike with it those to
whom one wished to impart health, strength, and fruitfulness. Those
struck with it rewarded the striker with presents, in recompense for the
benefit he was assumed to convey. This custom, which is probably of
Indian origin, survived in some parts of the Continent as a child’s game
even in the present century. Under the influence of Christianity the day
for cutting the wands was delayed, so that they might bloom at
Christmas, and in some parts it is still usual to arrange that there
shall be a flowering branch in the house at that time. In Nordlingen, a
century ago, families used to compete with each other as to which should
be able to show the most flourishing branch at Christmas-tide.[383] To
this day in Austrian Silesia the peasant women sally forth at midnight
on St. Andrew’s eve to pluck a branch from an apricot-tree. It is put in
water and flowers about Christmas time, and is taken by them to Mass on
Christmas-day.[384]

Amongst people to whom the apple-bearing tree of the Paradise-play was
familiar the substitution for the blooming branch of an evergreen decked
with fruits and ribbons and artificial flowers was quite natural. It
became, as it were, a proxy for the deciduous branch, still remaining
the occasion for present-giving, though now the tree became the giver
instead of the receiver of gifts.

The custom of hanging lights upon the Christmas-tree is a comparatively
late innovation, the well-known print of “Christmas in Luther’s Home,”
where an illuminated fir-tree is represented as the centre of the
festivity, being demonstrably an anachronism. The Christmas-tree, when
we first definitely meet with it at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, was certainly not illuminated. But the idea of a light-bearing
tree was familiar to the Middle Ages. An old Icelandic legend relates
that once upon a time, at Mödhrufell, there stood a mountain-ash which
had sprung from the blood of two innocent persons who had been executed
there.[385] Every Christmas-eve the tree was seen to be covered with
lights, which the strongest gale could not extinguish. These lights were
its wonderful blossoms, for in folk-lore lights are often made to
represent flowers and _vice-versâ_.[386] In the old French legend of
Perceval, the hero is represented as coming upon a tree illuminated with
a thousand candles, and Durmals le Galois, another hero of mediaeval
legend, twice saw a magnificent tree covered with lights from top to
bottom.[387]

It has already been mentioned that wax-tapers were given as presents at
the Roman Saturnalia, and it may well be that the connection of lighted
candles with Christmas time may date back to the ancient solstitial
celebrations, in which they were regarded as symbolical of the new birth
of the sun. The same idea—that of typifying the renewal of life by means
of lighted tapers—is found in the Netherlands in connection with the
May-tree, which there bears lights amongst its other decorations. At
Venlo on the Maas the maidens light the tapers as the evening comes on
and then dance around the lighted tree.[388] At Lüneberg, at wedding
festivities, it is usual to carry a “May” adorned with lights before the
bridal pair, and in the Hartz Mountains the so-called “St. John’s tree,”
round which the peasants dance, is a pyramid adorned with wreaths,
flowers, and lights.

In all these customs, which are no doubt survivals of the belief in a
tree-inhabiting deity, we see the collateral relations, if not the
direct progenitors of our Christmas-tree. In short, modern as it is in
its present form, the Christmas-tree epitomises many most ancient ideas;
is the point to which many streams converge whose source is hidden in a
far distant antiquity. It is the meeting-point of the old pagan belief
in the virtues vested in the tree and of the quaint fancies of the
Middle Ages, which loved to see spiritual truths embodied in material
forms. Christ, the Tree of Life, blossoming on Christmas-eve in Mary’s
bosom; the fatal tree of paradise whence sprang the cross, the
instrument of man’s salvation,—that “fruit-bearing heavenly-nourished
tree planted in the midst of redeemed man,” so often represented in
mediaeval art; the miracle of nature, so stirred by the wonder of the
event as to break forth into blossom in the midst of winter—all these
ideas, so characteristic of mediaeval thought, became grafted together
with observances derived from solstitial worship, upon the stock of the
sacred tree, laden with offerings and decked with fillets. Indeed the
Christmas-tree may be said to recapitulate the whole story of
tree-worship,—the May-tree, the harvest-tree, the Greek _eiresione_, the
tree as the symbol and embodiment of deity, and last but not least, the
universe-tree, bearing the lights of heaven for its fruit and covering
the world with its branches.




                               FOOTNOTES


[1]Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_ (Edin. 1889), p. 84.

[2]Goblet d’Alviella, _The Migration of Symbols_ (London, 1894), p. 119.

[3]_Op. cit._ chap. iv.

[4]J. Menant, _Les Pierres gravées de la Haute-Asie_ (Paris, 1886), Part
    II. p. 63.

[5]_Les Origines de l’Histoire_ (Paris, 1888), vol. i. p. 88.

[6]A. H. Sayce, _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_ (London, 1887),
    Lect. IV.

[7]Robertson Smith, _op. cit._ p. 169.

[8]Cf. Ex. xxxiv. 13; Deut. vii. 5, xii. 3, xvi. 21; Judges iii. 7, vi.
    25; 1 Kings xiv. 15; 2 Kings xvii. 16; cf. also Isaiah i. 29, lxv.
    3, lxvi. 17.

[9]Robertson Smith, _op. cit._ p. 172.

[10]Eusebius, _Praepar. Evang._, lib. i. cap. 10.

[11]Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._ p. 125.

[12]Ezek. xli. 18.

[13]1 Kings vi. 29-35.

[14]G. Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilisation_ (London, 1894), p. 122.

[15]Slatin Pasha, _Fire and Sword in the Sudan_ (London, 1896), p. 114.

[16]J. G. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_ (London, 1890), vol. i. p. 60.

[17]Duff Macdonald, _Africana_ (London, 1882), vol. i. p. 60.

[18]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 307.

[19]A. H. Sayce, _op. cit._ p. 238.

[20]_Encyclop. Brit._, 9th edition, vol. xviii. p. 850.

[21]_Isis et Osiris_, 46.

[22]Lajard, _Le Culte du cyprès pyramidal_ (1845), p. 148.

[23]Sir. W. Ouseley, _Travels_ (London, 1819), vol. iii. p. 83.

[24]Herodotus, vii. 31.

[25]R. Folkard, _Plant-lore, Legends, and Lyrics_ (London, 1892), p.
    239.

[26]M. D. Conway, _Demonology and Devil-lore_ (London, 1879), vol. i. p.
    299.

[27]Quintus Curtius, _De Gestis Alex._ viii. 33.

[28]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 4.

[29]Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._ p. 130.

[30]Murray’s _Handbook for Japan_ (London, 1884), p. 66.

[31]E. B. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_ (London, 1871), vol. ii. pp. 196,
    198.

[32]Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._ p. 131.

[33]Müller, _Amerikanische Urreligionen_ (Basel, 1855), p. 494.

[34]E. B. Tylor, _Anahuac_ (London, 1861), pp. 215, 265.

[35]Carl Bötticher, _Der Baumkultus der Hellenen_ (Berlin, 1856).

[36]L. R. Farnell, _The Cults of the Greek States_ (Oxford, 1896), vol.
    i. p. 14.

[37]Arthur Evans, in the anthropological section of the British
    Association, _Times_, 23rd Sept. 1896.

[38]Jacob Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_ (Göttingen, 1844), vol. i. p. 60.

[39]_Der Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme_ (Berlin,
    1875); _Antike Wald- und Feldkulte_ (Berlin, 1877). These volumes
    will be referred to as Mannhardt I. and II.

[40]A. Castren, _Ethnologische Vorlesungen_ (St. Petersburg, 1857), p.
    141.

[41]Boecler, _Der Esthen abergläubische Gebräuche_, etc. (St.
    Petersburg, 1854), quoted in Fergusson’s _Tree and Serpent Worship_.

[42]Lucan, _Pharsalia_, iii. 405.

[43]Jacob Grimm, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 67.

[44]Pliny, _Nat. Hist._ lib. xvi. 95.

[45]Mannhardt I. p. 70.

[46]Hall’s _Chronicle_ (London, 1809), p. 580.

[47]_Ibid._ pp. 515, 520.

[48]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 534.

[49]E. B. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, vol. ii. p. 202.

[50]_Op. cit._ Lecture III.

[51]The Attis of Catullus (London, 1892), Excursus II.

[52]Deuteronomy xxxiii. 16.

[53]1 Esdras ii. 5.

[54]Maspero, _op. cit._ p. 84, note 1.

[55]Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. i. chap. iii.

[56]_Ibid._ vol. i. p. 66.

[57]_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 429.

[58]_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 432.

[59]Pausanias, 8, 23, 6.

[60]Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 185.

[61]_Ibid._ vol. i. p. 212.

[62]_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 644.

[63]_Ibid._ vol. i. p. 9.

[64]Theocritus, _Idyll._ xviii. 48.

[65]Bötticher, _op. cit._ pp. 103, 229.

[66]_Ibid._ pp. 217, 220.

[67]Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 14.

[68]Wisdom xiii. 11 (Revised Version).

[69]Theocritus, _Epigram._ IV.

[70]Maximus Tyrius, viii. 1.

[71]Apuleius, _Florid._ i. 1.

[72]Maspero, _op. cit._ p. 84, note 3, and p. 130.

[73]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 467.

[74]De Gubernatis, _Mythologie des Plantes_, vol. ii. p. 26 _et seq._

[75]Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. i. pp. 108-110.

[76]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 345.

[77]Clemens Alex., _Protrepticus_, cap. 1, sect. 10.

[78]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 407.

[79]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 351.

[80]_Ibid._ p. 445.

[81]Theocritus, _Idyll._ vi. 7.

[82]_Fortnightly Review_, February 1870.

[83]Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 292.

[84]Euripides, _Troades_, 795.

[85]Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 325.

[86]Pliny, xvi. 60; Servius ad Virgil. _Aen._ iv. 507.

[87]Robertson Smith, _op. cit._ p. 175.

[88]Tiele, _Religion de l’Egypte_, etc. p. 83.

[89]A. Cunningham, _The Stûpa of Bharhut_ (London, 1879), p. 113.

[90]A. Cunningham, _op. cit._ p. 114.

[91]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 245.

[92]C. F. Keary, _The Vikings of Western Christendom_ (London, 1891),
    pp. 36, 52, 53.

[93]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 64.

[94]J. Grimm, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 369.

[95]Robertson Smith, _op. cit._ p. 169.

[96]Sir W. Ouseley, _Travels_, vol. i. p. 369.

[97]Statius, _Theb._ ix. 585.

[98]Apollon. Rhod. _Argonaut._ 2.

[99]Cf. Ovid, _Metamorphoses_, viii. 743.

[100]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 79.

[101]Orelli, No. 1266.

[102]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 88.

[103]_Ibid._ chap. xxi.

[104]_Ibid._ p. 385.

[105]Bötticher, chap. xxv.

[106]_Ibid._ p. 398.

[107]Sayce, _op. cit._ pp. 536, 539.

[108]Leviticus xxiii. 40.

[109]2 Maccabees xiv. 4.

[110]Bötticher, _op. cit._ pp. 321, 322.

[111]Pausanias, vii. 2, 4.

[112]Herodotus, vi. 75.

[113]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 35.

[114]Pausanias, ii. 13, 3.

[115]Sayce, _op. cit._ p. 493.

[116]Robertson Smith, _op. cit._ p. 125.

[117]_Nineteenth Century_, October 1895, p. 607.

[118]Isaiah xiii. 21; xxxiv. 14.

[119]Leviticus xvii. 7.

[120]Maspero, _op. cit._ pp. 83, 84.

[121]Mannhardt II. chap. ii.

[122]Mannhardt II. p. 139.

[123]_Aeneid_, viii. 601.

[124]Mannhardt II. p. 31.

[125]Hymn. Homer. Aphrod. 259-273.

[126]Plutarch, _De Defect. Orac._ 11.

[127]Hymn. in Cererem. 41.

[128]Apollonius Rhod., _Argonaut._ i. 471 _et seq._

[129]Mannhardt II. p. 1.

[130]Lucian, _Verae Historiae_, lib. 1.

[131]W. R. S. Ralston, _Contemporary Review_, vol. xxxi. p. 521.

[132]_Ibid._ vol. xxxi. p. 525.

[133]Robertson Smith, _op. cit._ pp. 126, 213, 461.

[134]_Aeneid_, iii. 27-34.

[135]_Metamorphoses_, viii. 741, 774, translated by Henry King (London,
    1871).

[136]Mannhardt I. pp. 34 _et seq._

[137]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 79.

[138]_Ibid._ p. 79.

[139]_Ibid._ p. 79.

[140]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 79.

[141]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 83.

[142]Mannhardt I. p. 146.

[143]Mannhardt II. p. 39.

[144]_Ibid._ I. p. 75.

[145]Mannhardt I. p. 89.

[146]_Ibid._ I. p. 93.

[147]_Ibid._ I. p. 117.

[148]Mannhardt I. pp. 126 _et seq._

[149]Mannhardt I. pp. 138 _et seq._

[150]F. Rinder, _Old-World Japan_ (London, 1895), p. 137.

[151]Mannhardt I. p. 143.

[152]H. W. Bates, _The Naturalist on the Amazon_ (London, 1863), vol. i.
    p. 73.

[153]_The Prose or Younger Edda_, translated by G. W. Dasent (Stockholm,
    1842), p. 10.

[154]Mannhardt I. p. 7.

[155]Catlin, _Letters, etc., on North American Indians_, vol. ii. p.
    169.

[156]_Works and Days_, v. 143.

[157]_Odyssey_, xix. 162.

[158]_Aeneid_, viii. 315.

[159]F. Galton, _Narrative of an Explorer_, etc. (London, 1853), p. 188.

[160]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 117.

[161]Alex. v. Humboldt, _Examen Critique_, vol. i. p. 52.

[162]Apollod. iii. 14, 3.

[163]Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._ p. 142.

[164]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 116.

[165]Diodor. v. 66.

[166]Pausanias, ix. 22, 2.

[167]_Ibid._ vii. 4, 4; viii. 23, 4.

[168]Servius ad Virgil. _Aeneid_, iii. 91.

[169]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 338.

[170]_Metamorphoses_, ii. 346-366, translated by Henry King (London,
    1871).

[171]_Metamorphoses_, viii. 711-724. The story is told by Lelex of
    Troezene at a feast given to Theseus by Achelous, the river-god.

[172]Bion, _Idyl._ i. 63.

[173]_Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act ii. Sc. 2.

[174]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 268.

[175]_Ibid._ p. 389.

[176]Percy’s _Reliques_.

[177]_Old-World Japan_, p. 115.

[178]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 274.

[179]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 325.

[180]_Old-World Japan_, p. 127.

[181]_Op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 786.

[182]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 328.

[183]_Selections from the Talmud_ (London, 1889), p. 318.

[184]Moore’s _Life of Lord Byron_, vol. i. p. 101.

[185]Mannhardt I. p. 32.

[186]_Ibid._ p. 53.

[187]_Ibid._ p. 182.

[188]Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ lib. xvi. 27.

[189]Tacitus, _Annal._ xiii. 58.

[190]Pliny, _op. cit._ lib. xv. 36.

[191]The late General Gordon, in _Times_ for 5th January 1885.

[192]Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._ p. 142.

[193]Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 695.

[194]J. Menant, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 220.

[195]_Ibid._ vol. i. p. 170 _et seq._

[196]Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._ p. 145 _et seq._

[197]Lajard, _op. cit._ Pl. i.

[198]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 70.

[199]Mannhardt I. p. 222.

[200]_Ibid._ p. 46.

[201]Virgil, _Georg._ ii. 291; Servius ad Virgil. _Aeneid_, iv. 446.

[202]Robertson Smith, _op. cit._ p. 169.

[203]Pausanias, x. 5, 3.

[204]_Encyclop. Brit._, 9th edition, vol. xvii. p. 808.

[205]Sayce, _op. cit._ p. 241.

[206]_Ibid._ p. 240.

[207]Robertson Smith, _op. cit._ p. 179.

[208]2 Samuel v. 24.

[209]Hosea iv. 12 (R. V.).

[210]_Odyssey_, xiv. 327.

[211]Scholiast on Sophocles, _Trachiniae_ 1169.

[212]Herodotus, ii. 52, 57.

[213]Clem. Alex., _Protrept._ ii. 11.

[214]Silius Ital. vi. 691.

[215]Pausanias, viii. 23, 4; i. 17, 5.

[216]Philostrat. _Imag._ ii. 33.

[217]Servius ad Virgil. _Aen._ iii. 466.

[218]_Encyclop. Brit._, 9th edition, vol. xvii. p. 809. Cf. also
    Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 40.

[219]_Metam._ vii. 622-654.

[220]Apollod. i. 9, 16; Philostrat. _Imag._ ii. 15.

[221]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 341.

[222]Euripides, _Hecuba_, 456.

[223]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 344.

[224]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 344.

[225]Moses Choren, _Hist. Armen._ i. 15, 19.

[226]F. Lenormant, _La Divination chez les Chaldéens_ (Paris, 1875), p.
    85.

[227]Sir W. Ouseley, _Travels_, vol. i. p. 369.

[228]The Sháh Námeh, _Chandos Classics_, p. 336.

[229]Ovid, _Fasti_, iii. 294.

[230]_Ibid._ iv. 650; Virgil, _Aeneid_, vii. 81.

[231]Cicero, _De Divinat._ ii. 40.

[232]Dion. Halic. i. 14.

[233]Bötticher, _op. cit._ chap. xi.

[234]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 164.

[235]Cicero, _De Divinat._ i. 45.

[236]Dion. Halic. v. 16.

[237]Robertson Smith, _op. cit._ p. 126.

[238]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 113, note 22.

[239]Herodotus, iv. 67.

[240]Ammian. Marcell. L. 31.

[241]Tacitus, _Germ._ x.

[242]E. Davies, _Celtic Researches_, p. 812; _British Druids_, p. 43.

[243]R. Smith, _op. cit._ p. 179, note 5.

[244]The whole subject is very fully treated by Bötticher, _op. cit._
    chap. xvi.

[245]Mannhardt I. p. 303.

[246]De Vallemont, _Physique occulte_ (1696), p. 10.

[247]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 113.

[248]John O’Neill, _The Night of the Gods_, vol. i. p. 53.

[249]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 367.

[250]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 114.

[251]A. de Gubernatis, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 99.

[252]J. Brand, _Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great
    Britain_ (London, 1849), vol. i. p. 58.

[253]W. Hone, _Year Book_ (1878), p. 588.

[254]W. Henderson, _Folk-lore of the Northern Counties_, pp. 110, 111.

[255]J. O. Halliwell, _Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales_ (1849), pp.
    219, 220.

[256]C. H. Poole, _Customs, Legends, and Superstitions of
    Staffordshire_, p. 74.

[257]Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._ p. 169.

[258]_Ibid._ p. 171.

[259]Sir G. Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_ (London, 1855), p. 1.

[260]A. H. Sayce, _op. cit._ p. 238.

[261]A. H. Sayce, _op. cit._ p. 362.

[262]Isaiah xiv. 13.

[263]De Gubernatis, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 45.

[264]_The Prose or Younger Edda_, translated by G. W. Dasent, p. 16.

[265]De Gubernatis, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 80.

[266]C. P. Tiele, _History of the Egyptian Religion_ (London, 1882), p.
    46.

[267]Lethaby, _Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth_ (London, 1892), p.
    120.

[268]_Ibid._ p. 111.

[269]_Babylonian and Oriental Record_ (June 1888), pp. 149-159.

[270]_Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_ (Washington,
    1894).

[271]Revelation xxii. 2.

[272]Lethaby, _op. cit._ p. 107.

[273]_Ibid._ p. 102.

[274]Herodotus, ii. 44.

[275]De Gubernatis, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 102.

[276]Mannhardt I. 307.

[277]Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._ pp. 107, 113.

[278]_Kalevala_, Second Rune.

[279]W. F. Kirby, _The Hero of Esthonia_ (London, 1895), vol. i. p. 48.

[280]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 516.

[281]_Ibid._ p. 518.

[282]Pliny, xxiv. 102.

[283]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 378.

[284]Windischman, quoted by Herbert Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_,
    vol. i. p. 375.

[285]De Gubernatis, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 350.

[286]De Gubernatis, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 351.

[287]J. Muir, _Metrical Translations from Sanskrit writers_ (London,
    1879), p. 168.

[288]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 548.

[289]Athenaeus, 473 C.

[290]_Bacchae_, 284.

[291]_Bacchae_, 297.

[292]W. Pater, _Greek Studies_ (London, 1895), p. 7.

[293]_Principles of Sociology_, vol. i. p. 377.

[294]De Gubernatis, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 261.

[295]De Gubernatis, vol. i. p. 262.

[296]_Ibid._ p. 182.

[297]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 9.

[298]G. Smith, _Chaldaean Account of Genesis_, pp. 88, 89.

[299]J. Menant, _op. cit._ vol. i. fig. 121.

[300]Sayce, _op. cit._ p. 240.

[301]Homer, _Odyssey_, iv. 563; Hesiod, _Works and Days_, 166.

[302]_Encyclop. Brit._, 9th edition, vol. viii. p. 536.

[303]2 Esdras ii. 18.

[304]_Ibid._ ii. 12.

[305]Eisenmenger, _Entdecktes Judenthum_ (1700), Bd. II. p. 318.

[306]Folkard, _op. cit._ p. 10.

[307]A. H. Sayce, _op. cit._ p. 48.

[308]Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._ p. 171.

[309]E. B. Tylor, _Early History of Mankind_ (London, 1878), p. 358.

[310]W. F. Warren, _Paradise Found_ (London, 1885), p. 144.

[311]J. Theodore Bent, _Nineteenth Century_ (October 1895), p. 607.

[312]_Iliad_, xi. 76.

[313]Sayce, _op. cit._ p. 360.

[314]_Paradise Lost_, Book IV. 133-147.

[315]Hesiod, _Theogn._ 215 _et seq._

[316]_Early Travels in Palestine_ (London, Bohn, 1848), p. 276.

[317]S. Baring-Gould, _Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_ (London, 1866),
    p. 236.

[318]Plato, _Timaeus_, iii.

[319]W. F. Warren, _op. cit._ p. 12.

[320]_Select Letters of Columbus_ (Hakluyt Society), p. 137.

[321]_Old-World Japan_, p. 79.

[322]Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._ p. 176.

[323]Lethaby, _op. cit._ p. 97.

[324]_Decline and Fall_, chap. lii.

[325]Brand’s _Antiquities_, vol. i. p. 217.

[326]Court of Love, vv. 1431-35.

[327]_Anatomie of Abuses_ (1585), p. 94.

[328]J. Northbrooke, _Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, etc., are
    Reproved_ (1577), p. 140.

[329]Brand’s _Antiquities_, vol. i. p. 244.

[330]_Notes and Queries_, 3rd ser. vol. vii. p. 425.

[331]Brand’s _Antiquities_, vol. i. p. 219.

[332]Mannhardt I. p. 315.

[333]Mannhardt I. p. 160.

[334]Camden, quoted in Brand’s _Antiquities_, vol. i. p. 227.

[335]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 78.

[336]_Ibid._ p. 77.

[337]Mannhardt II. p. 212.

[338]_Ibid._ p. 214.

[339]Bötticher, _op. cit._ p. 393.

[340]_Knights_, v. 729.

[341]_Wasps_, v. 398.

[342]_Plutus_, v. 1054.

[343]Mannhardt II. p. 257.

[344]Aeneas Sylvius, _Opera_ (Bale, 1571), p. 418.

[345]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 73.

[346]_Ibid._ p. 74.

[347]Mannhardt I. p. 167.

[348]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 100.

[349]Farnell, _op. cit._ vol. i. pp. 185, 189.

[350]Mannhardt I. p. 169.

[351]Mannhardt I. p. 174.

[352]_Ibid._ p. 218.

[353]Mannhardt I. p. 315.

[354]_Ibid._ p. 313.

[355]Mannhardt I. pp. 341 _et seq._

[356]Brand’s _Antiquities_, vol. i. pp. 253-261.

[357]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 240.

[358]Mannhardt I. p. 360.

[359]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 241.

[360]Frazer, _op. cit._ vol. i. p. 242.

[361]_Ibid._ vol. i. p. 243.

[362]Mannhardt I. p. 523.

[363]Alexander Tille, _Die Geschichte der Deutschen Weihnacht_ (Leipzig,
    1893).

[364]_Ibid._ p. 2.

[365]J. G. Frazer in _Encyclop. Brit._, 9th edition, vol. xxi. p. 321.

[366]W. Stukeley, _Medallic History of Carausius_ (1757-59), vol. ii.
    pp. 163, 164.

[367]Brand’s _Antiquities_, vol. i. p. 520.

[368]_Ibid._ pp. 519, 521.

[369]Mannhardt I. p. 240.

[370]_Ibid._ p. 238.

[371]Tille, _op. cit._ p. 264.

[372]Goethe, _Die Leiden des jungen Werthers_ (Am 20 December).

[373]Schiller und Lotte (Stuttgart, 1856), p. 574.

[374]Tille, _op. cit._ p. 258.

[375]_Ibid._ p. 259.

[376]Tille, _op. cit._ chap. viii.

[377]Tille, _op. cit._ p. 220.

[378]_Ibid._ p. 221.

[379]_Ibid._ p. 226.

[380]Folkard, _op. cit._ pp. 352, 353.

[381]Mannhardt I. p. 242.

[382]Tille, _op. cit._ p. 244.

[383]Tille, _op. cit._ p. 249.

[384]_Ibid._ p. 250.

[385]Mannhardt I. p. 241.

[386]Mannhardt, _Germanische Mythen_ (Berlin, 1858), p. 470, note.

[387]Tille, _op. cit._ p. 220.

[388]Mannhardt I. p. 244.




                                 INDEX


                                   A
  Acacia, the, 11, 39, 40, 45
  Accadians, the, 2, 4, 6, 111, 133
  Acis, metamorphosis of, 81
  Adonis, 11, 75, 81, 159
  Aesculapius, laurel sacred to, 37
  Alexander the Great, and the flower-maidens, 60;
      and the Persian tree-oracles, 99
  Ama-ravati, Buddhist sculptures at, 14
  Ambrosia, 126
  America, tree-worship in, 16, 17
  Amrita, 125
  Aphrodite, 30, 32, 46, 81, 88;
      apples sacred to, 37;
      myrtle sacred to, 37
  Apollo, 47, 76, 98, 99;
      and Daphne, 77;
      laurel sacred to, 36, 47, 50, 77
  Apples, sacred to Aphrodite, 37;
      of Hesperides, 119
  Arabia, the _Jinni_ of, 24, 52, 54, 94;
      tree-oracles in, 99, 102;
      tree-worship in, 45
  _Argo_, oracular beam of the, 98
  Armenia, tree-oracles in, 99;
      use of branches in, 49
  Artemis, 49, 76;
      a vegetation deity, 29, 88;
      sacred tree of, 45, 49
  _Ashêra_, the, 8, 88, 96
  Assyria, tree-worship in, 5, 6, 88
  Astarte, 8, 30, 87;
      the cypress sacred to, 40
  Athena, 152;
      the olive sacred to, 38
  Athens, festivals at, 48, 151
  Atlantis, the lost, 139
  Atlas, Mount, 110, 119, 135, 136
  Attis, a tree-god, 11, 75, 80, 81, 154, 159
  Auxerre, sacred tree of, 20
  Avalon, the isle of, 140

                                   B
  Babylonia, tree-worship in, 6;
      mountain worship in, 112;
      world-tree of, 111
  Banian, the, 42, 64, 76
  Basil, Holy, of India, 43
  Baucis and Philemon, metamorphosis of, 79
  Bavaria, Whitsuntide custom in, 159
  Beech, the sacred, 46
  Bharhut, Buddhist sculptures at, 15, 40, 42
  Bo-tree, the, 40, 116
  Bodhi-trees of the Buddhas, 40
  Borneo, tree-worship in, 16
  Bötticher, general conclusion of, regarding tree-worship, 21
  Brahma, 14, 43, 115
  Branches forced into flower at Christmas, 170;
      religious use of, 13, 36, 37, 38, 47, 48, 91
  Brittany, use of laurel branch in, 91
  Buddhas, the Bodhi-trees of the, 40
  Buddhism, tree-worship and, 14, 40, 110, 116, 142
  Burma, tree worship in, 16;
      tree-spirits of, 65

                                   C
  Canaan, tree-worship in, 3, 8, 88;
      tree-oracles in, 95
  Canute forbids tree-worship, 20
  Carinthia, Green George of, 157
  Cedar, the sacred, 7, 39, 40, 99, 95
  Centaurs, the, 55, 56
  Ceres, sacred grove of, 63
  Chaldaea, cosmogony of, 113;
      demons of, 53;
      divination in, 105;
      illustrious mounds of, 112;
      oracles of, 95, 99;
      tree-worship in, 4, 6;
      world-tree of, 111
  Charlemagne destroys the Irmensûl, 120
  China, divination in, 105;
      legends of, 83;
      paradise legends of, 133;
      tree-worship in, 15;
      world-tree of, 118
  Christmas observances, 162 _et seq._
  Christmas-tree, introduction into England of, 165;
      origin in Germany of, 165
  Churches, decoration of, at Christmas, 164
  Circassia, pear-tree worshipped in, 153
  Clymene, the daughters of, 78
  Clytia, metamorphosis of, 80
  Columbus and the earthly paradise, 141
  Cronos, 163;
      a vegetation deity, 29
  Cybele, 12, 30, 75, 81
  Cyclops, the, 55, 56
  Cypress, the sacred, 5, 13, 17, 39, 40, 51, 89, 131

                                   D
  Damaras, creation legend of the, 74
  Daphne, 94;
      metamorphosis of, 77
  Daphnephoria, the, 47
  Delphi, sacred laurel of, 36, 47, 50, 77, 98;
      oracle of, 36, 50, 77, 94, 98, 102
  Didû, the, emblem of Osiris, 34, 117
  Dionysus, fruit-tree dressed as, 31, 33;
      sacred tree of, 27;
      a tree deity, 11, 12, 31, 32, 39, 48, 49, 57, 126, 159
  Divination in Germany, 102;
      by leaves, 107;
      by roots, 106;
      in Sarmatia, 102;
      in Scythia, 102;
      in Sweden, 105
  Divining rod, the, 103 _et seq._
  Dodona, oracular oak of, 28, 36, 93, 96, 98, 102
  Druids, the, 20, 35, 103, 105, 161, 164
  Dryads, the, 55, 58, 63
  Dusares and the vine, 40

                                   E
  Ea, 7, 95, 111;
      sacred cedar of, 40, 131
  Eddas, the, account of man’s origin in, 73;
      description of Yggdrasil in, 112
  Egypt, sacred sycamores of, 9, 25, 27, 44, 45;
      tree-demons of, 55;
      tree-worship in, 9, 10, 25, 45;
      world-tree of, 110, 117
  _Eiresione_, the, 48, 151, 173;
      addressed as a person, 153
  Elves, 24, 52, 63, 65
  England, Christmas-tree in, 165;
      May celebrations in, 144 _et seq._;
      tree-worship in, 20
  Esdras, paradise of, 131
  Esthonia, tree-worship in, 19, 44;
      world-tree of, 122

                                   F
  Fairies, the, 65
  Fauns, the, 55, 58
  Faunus, grove oracles of, 100
  Fertility, the tree as genius of, 87, 153
  _Ficus ruminalis_, the, 76, 86
  Fig-tree, the, associated with the silvani, 58;
      carved as Pan, 33;
      spirit of, 58
  Finland, tree-spirits of, 70;
      tree-worship in, 19;
      world-tree of, 120
  Flower-maidens, the, 60
  France, divination in, 105;
      harvest custom in, 150;
      tree-worship in, 19

                                   G
  Gautama, 14, 41, 43, 76, 116;
      and the Indian shot, 82
  Germany, autumn festival in, 163, 166, 170;
      Christmas-tree in, 165;
      divination in, 102, 105;
      May customs in, 150, 155;
      tree-demons of, 19, 66;
      tree-worship in, 18
  Gilgames, 119, 137
  Gilgit, sacred cedar of, 90
  Glastonbury thorn, the, 166, 168
  God, the, and the tree, 24 _et seq._
  Gods, food of the, 113, 114, 122
  Greece, creation legends of, 74;
      harvest customs of, 151;
      paradise legends of, 131;
      tree-worship in, 12, 17, 28, 46
  Green ladies, the, 68

                                   H
  Hamadryads, the, 57, 58
  Haoma, 13, 123, 130
  Harvest May, the, 151, 173
  Hāthor, a tree-goddess, 9, 10, 25
  Helen, sacred tree of, 18, 31
  Hera, 29, 32, 76, 155
  Hermes, 79;
      birth of, 76
  Hesperides, trees of the, 101, 119, 136

                                   I
  Iceland, paradise legend of, 138
  India, paradise legend of, 129;
      soma ritual of, 124;
      tree-worship in, 13, 14, 35, 40, 43, 64;
      world-tree of, 115
  Indra, the paradise of, 129;
      and the soma, 125
  Irmensûl, the, 120
  Israelites, tree-worship amongst, 3, 8;
      use of branches by, 48
  Istar, 6, 8, 30, 88
  Italy, modern belief in wood-spirits in, 58;
      tree-oracles in, 100;
      tree-worship in, 12, 17, 28, 37, 47

                                   J
  Jack-in-the-Green, 148, 157
  Japan, legends of, 83, 84;
      paradise legend of, 141;
      tree-demons of, 70;
      tree-worship in, 15;
      world-tree of, 118
  _Jinni_ of Arabia, the, 24, 52, 54, 94

                                   L
  Laurel, the sacred, 36, 47, 50, 59, 77, 91, 98
  Life-rood, the (Lebensrute), 103, 127, 170
  Life, the tree of, 15, 130, 131, 142, 170
  Life-tree, the, 84, 101
  Little Daedala, festival of the, 155
  Ljeschi, 69

                                   M
  Mahometan paradise, the, 132, 134
  Maid Marian, 158
  Maundeville, Sir J., his account of paradise, 137;
      his description of a tree of paradise, 143
  May-bride, the, 158
  May celebrations, 21, 145 _et seq._
  “May,” the, 149, 151, 153
  May-pole, the, 146, 154, 155
  May queen, the, 146, 156
  Melcarth, the cypress sacred to, 40
  Melus, metamorphosis of, 80
  Metamorphosis into trees, 77 _et seq._
  Metempsychosis into trees, 82 _et seq._
  Mexico, human sacrifices in, 159;
      tree-symbol found in, 16;
      tree-worship in, 17
  Milton, his description of paradise, 135
  Mistletoe, 20, 164
  Mithra, 13, 40, 163
  Moss-women, the, 67
  Myrtle, the sacred, 13, 29, 37, 39, 86
  Mulberry-tree, the, 96

                                   N
  Nakhla, sacred acacia of, 45
  Nantes, tree-worship condemned by Council of, 20
  Narcissus, metamorphosis of, 81
  Nejrân, sacred palm of, 45, 99
  New Zealand, cosmogonic legend of, 110
  Nicaragua, tree-worship in, 17
  Nu̔ît, a tree-goddess, 10, 25, 27, 117;
      goddess of the sky, 110, 117

                                   O
  Oak, the sacred, of Ceres, 63;
      of the Druids, 20;
      of Esthonia, 122;
      of Finland, 19, 44, 121;
      of Pan, 56;
      of the Roman Capitol, 25;
      at Romove, 44;
      of Zeus, 28, 35, 37, 93, 96, 101, 155
  Olive, the, sacred to Athena, 38;
      venerated by the Semites, 39, 49
  Olympus, 134
  Omens, tree, 101
  Oracle-lots, 102
  Oracles, tree, 93 _et seq._
  Origin-myths, 73
  Oschophoria, the, 48, 152
  Osiris, his emblem, the Didû or Tât, 34, 117;
      a tree-god, 11, 40, 159

                                   P
  Palestine, tree-demons of, 54;
      tree-worship in, 7, 8
  Palm-tree, the, 5, 45, 49, 88, 99
  Pan, a tree-god, 31, 33, 46, 56;
      the pipe of, 81
  Paradise, 128 _et seq._;
      an artificial, 143;
      the earthly, 136;
      trees of, 131, 142, 170
  Paradise-plays, mediaeval, 169, 171
  Patagonia, tree-worship in, 17
  Pear-tree, the, worshipped in Circassia, 153
  Permians, trees worshipped by the, 19
  Persia, creation legends of, 23, 130;
      haoma ritual of, 123;
      tree-oracle in, 99;
      tree-worship in, 13, 123;
      use of branches in, 49;
      world-tree of, 115, 142
  Peru, wood-ghost of, 71
  Pfingstl, the, 159
  Phyllis, metamorphosis of, 79
  Pine, the sacred, 28, 31, 56, 58, 59, 80;
      venerated by the Semites, 39
  Pippala, the, associated with Brahma, 14;
      with Gautama, 41
  Plane-tree, the, of Armavira, 99;
      its connection with Pelops, 86;
      with Persian kings, 13
  Poland, tree-worship in, 19
  Pomegranate, the, 5, 30, 80
  Poplar, the, sacred to Dis, 39;
      Zeus born beneath, 76
  Puritans, denunciation of May-poles by, 21, 146

                                   R
  Robin Hood, king of the May, 158
  Rome, grove oracle in, 100;
      tree-worship in, 17, 28, 47
  Romove, sacred oak of, 44
  Russia, tree-demons of, 19, 66, 69;
      tree-worship in, 19;
      Whitsuntide custom in, 150

                                   S
  St. Mark’s, Venice, symbol of sacred tree in, 2, 5, 7
  Sânchi, Buddhist sculptures at, 14, 42
  Sanctuary, the tree as, 49
  Sarmatia, divination in, 102
  Saturnalia, the, 163, 172
  Satyrs, the, 55, 56, 57
  Scandinavia, world-tree of, 112
  Scythia, divination in, 102
  _Seīrīm_, “Satyrs” of the Bible, 54
  Semites, tree-oracles of the, 95;
      tree-worship amongst the, 7, 39-87
  Sia Indians, cosmogony of, 118
  Siam, tree-worship in, 16
  Sileni, the, 55, 56
  Silvanus, 28, 57
  Sioux, creation legend of, 74
  Soma, 124, 126
  Sudan, tree-worship in the, 10
  Sumatra, tree-worship in, 16
  Swabia, spring observances in, 160
  Sweden, divination in, 105;
      May observances in, 150;
      tree-spirits of, 68
  Switzerland, tree-demons of, 68
  Sycamores, the sacred, of Egypt, 9, 25, 27, 44, 45, 118

                                   T
  Taara, a tree-god, 44
  Talmud, the, paradise of, 132;
      life-tree mentioned in, 85
  Tammuz, 6, 11, 12, 111, 159
  Tapio, 70
  Tât-pillar, the, 34, 117
  Tengus of Japan, the, 70
  Travancore, sacred tree in, 14
  Tree, the, births beneath, 76;
      Chaldaean symbol of the sacred, 2, 5, 30, 88;
      dressed or carved as anthropomorphic god, 27, 31, 32, 35, 103;
      of the community, 86, 154;
      of the family, 86, 101;
      of life, 15, 130, 131, 142, 170;
      lights on, 91, 171;
      offerings to, 30, 45, 46;
      of paradise, 131, 169;
      in relation to human life, 72;
      as symbol of fertility, 88;
      of universe, 109 _et seq._, 173
  Tree-deities, 9, 16, 24 _et seq._
  Tree-demons, 16, 24, 52, 55 _et seq._
  Tree-nymphs, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62
  Tree-oracles, 93 _et seq._
  Tree-origins, 73 _et seq._
  Tree-omens, 101
  Tree-sanctuaries, 49
  Tree-soul, the generalised, 90;
      primitive conception of, 1
  Tree-worship, in Africa, 11;
      in America, 16, 17;
      in Arabia, 45;
      in Assyria, 6;
      in Borneo, 16;
      in Burma, 16;
      in Canaan, 3, 8;
      in Chaldaea, 4, 6, 111;
      in China, 15;
      in Egypt, 9, 10, 25, 45;
      in England, 20;
      in Esthonia, 19;
      in France, 19;
      in Finland, 19;
      in Germany, 18;
      in Greece, 17, 28, 46;
      in India, 13, 14, 35, 40, 43, 64, 124;
      in Japan, 15;
      in Mexico, 17;
      in Nicaragua, 17;
      in Palestine, 3, 7, 8;
      in Patagonia, 17;
      in Persia, 13, 123;
      in Phoenicia, 8, 12;
      in Phrygia, 12;
      in Poland, 19;
      in Rome, 17, 46;
      in Russia, 19;
      in the Semitic area, 7, 39, 87;
      in Siam, 16;
      in the Sudan, 11;
      in Sumatra, 16;
      origin of, 22
  Trees, Christmas flowering, 116;
      legends of bleeding, 62, 63;
      legends of speaking, 101
  Tristram and Iseult, legend of, 82
  Trophonius, oracle of, 94
  Tylor, Mr. E. B., on tree-worship, 21
  Tyrol, wild women of, 67

                                   U
  Upsala, sacred grove of, 43

                                   V
  Vine-women of Lucian, the, 60
  Vine, the, sacred to Dionysus, 39;
      to Dusares, 40;
      venerated by the Semites, 39
  Vishnu, 43, 76

                                   W
  “Wege-warte,” legend of the, 83
  Wends, the, and the May-pole, 156
  Wild-fanggen, the, 67
  Wild men of the woods, 21, 52, 56, 66, 68, 71, 161
  Willow, the, connected with Artemis, 29;
      with Hera, 29, 76;
      inhabited by tree-spirit, 62
  Woden, 43
  Wood-maidens, 67
  World-mountain, the, 110, 112, 118, 134
  World-tree, the, 109 _et seq._;
      of Buddhists, 116;
      of Chaldaea, 111;
      of Egypt, 110, 117;
      of Esthonia, 122;
      of Finland, 120;
      of India, 115;
      of Persia, 115;
      of Scandinavia, 112

                                   Y
  Yggdrasil, 112 _et seq._

                                   Z
  Zeus, a tree-god, 18, 28, 29, 35, 46, 155;
      oracle of, at Dodona, 93, 96
  Zeus-Ammon, oracle of, 96


                                THE END


           _Printed by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.




                          Transcriber’s Notes


--Silently corrected a few palpable typos.

--In the text versions only, delimited italicized text in _underscores_.

--In the Latin-1 text version only, the unusual character “latin u with
  dasia” is represented by “u'”.

--In the Latin-1 text version only, transliterated Greek words are
  delimited by {brackets}.